Real Leadership

Rabbi David Ackerman on Pinchas' two distinct visions of leadership, and two sharply divergent paradigms of proper behavior on the part of a leader.
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My trip to Immokalee

CONGREGATION SHA’AREI KODESH 2nd Day of Passover MARCH 27, 2013 ©  RABBI LOUIS RIESER   Hag kasher v’Sameah. I want to thank Rabbi Baum for this invitation to speak about my experience in Immokalee with T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights.  In January I joined 9 other rabbis to learn first-hand about the conditions...
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“Love Trumps Power”?

“Not by might, not by power, but by my spirit….” (Zechariah 4:6) Is that the way forward in 2017? Our rabbinic ancestors chose Zechariah’s important words as the prophetic message of Chanukah. In some ways, it’s an odd choice. In the Torah portion, Miketz, Joseph harnesses Pharaoh’s might and power to save the Egyptians from...
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Seeing the Invisible

With the collective stress of thousands of commuters all trying to get from point A to point B, subway transit in New York can be a little overwhelming. When I’m in the city, I deal with the stress like many fellow riders— I behave as though surrounded by a protective bubble. I notice just enough...
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How can a grasshopper change the world?

In the struggle for human rights, it is hard not to feel like a tiny grasshopper scratching at the massive walls of injustice we face all around us. There are so many people who are suffering, so many systems that are deeply broken; there is so much work to do. In parshat Shlach Lecha, God...
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Sh’lach-Lecha: One Small Step, One Giant Leap

...if we want the soil of our land to live up to our hopes for it, we must hold to our faith — whether that is in God, in the land itself, or, in our case, the conviction of the cause(s) we are working for — and believe that we will reap the fruits of our labor.
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Photo of the author, Rabbi Lana Zilberman Soloway

Bamidbar: Lispor and Lesaper

We have been counting the days since October 7, counting the unbearable number of lost lives, counting the number of hostages, counting the number of people who became refugees in their own land. We count and we count and we count. And we tell a story. Each and every one of us.
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