Encompassing the Truth in Four Directions

In college, I used to tutor inner city middle school students through an organization called Making Waves. Once during a staff training, I was placed in a group with two Latinx tutors and two black tutors; the other group consisted of five white tutors. When my group playfully accused the supervisors of dividing us up...
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On Power, Hope, and Change

A Sermon for Rosh Hashanah, 5772 Rabbi Barbara Penzner   I’d like to start by talking about the movies. Who here has seen “Moneyball”? Who is planning to see it? Good, that means that you may have some idea about the movie. It’s the story of Billy Beane, general manager of the 2002 Oakland Athletics....
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Ritual and Regulation: A Priestly Corrective to Prophecy

Commentary on Parshat Kedoshim (Leviticus 19:1 – 20:27) In the Bible, there are two traditions, the prophetic and the priestly, both of which aim at building a good society, but do so taking very different approaches. In the Haftarah read on Yom Kippur the prophet Isaiah famously demands: “Is such the fast I desire, a...
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Hunger: Edom or Israel?

There were three hundred and sixty five thoroughfares in the great city of Rome, and in each there were three hundred and sixty five palaces; and in each palace, there were three hundred and sixty five stories and each story contained sufficient to provide the whole world with food. (Talmud Bavli Pesachim 118b) With less...
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Parashat Bamidbar: The Imperative to Provide Refuge

My father’s family were refugees from Vienna, who fled just before World War II broke out, but not before my grandfather had been deported to Dachau. He remained incarcerated there from November 13, 1938, until January 19, 1939. He knew he had to leave Austria with his family. But leaving wasn’t easy. First, it meant...
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Sacred Noncompliance (Parshat Ki Tisa)

Commentary on Parshat Ki Tisa (Exodus 30:11 – 34:35) The Golden Calf is one of the most spiritually disturbing incidents in the narrative of the Israelites’ journey through the desert. While Moses is away on the mountain with God, the Israelite camp dissolves into a chaos of mistrust and idol worship under the care of...
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Yom Yerushalayim Obscures The Reality of Modern Jerusalem

A d’var Torah for Yom Yerushalayim by Daniel Seidemann. Jerusalem Day, Yom Yerushalayim, which is this coming Friday, was created by the Israeli Chief Rabbinate, the Rabbanut, in the wake of the 1967 war, and subsequently enshrined as a national holiday under law. A religious commemoration of the “reunification” of Jerusalem when Hallel is said,...
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Free Speech: The Gray Area

On Thursday, January 11 at 4pm ET, T’ruah invites you to begin to disentangle your thoughts on "Free Speech: The Gray Area" with T'ruah's Rabbi Jill Jacobs and Suzanne Nossel, CEO of PEN America.
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Birth, Visibility, and Justice

Ishah ki tazria. Parshat Tazria opens with laws related to a woman giving birth. The Torah’s terse account of birth screams out for interpretation, for filling in the space between these black letters with the many, and varied, experiences of birth. These stories are so necessary because people are often blind to experiences of birth,...
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