A Time for Realism, or a Time for Imagination?

For many of us, we anticipate that this week will be full of so much change and upheaval, fear and anger, anxiety and sadness, and hopefully also motivation and drive to act. So how do we respond in the face of great challenge? Our Israelite ancestors certainly faced some pretty trying circumstances, so what can...
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PREPARE

This is God’s message for the people before they are to experience the awesome Presence at the mountain: “Lekh el-ha’am v’kidashtam hayom umakhar…” Go to the people and sanctify them.  The exact meaning and practice of this sanctification is not explained.  Some commentators, such as Rashbam and Ibn Ezra, see it as purification and read...
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Your Joy Is Your Sorrow Unmasked

A week ago Sunday, marked by the new moon of the Jewish month of Adar, I spent the day at the Mount Carmel Cemetery in Northeast Philadelphia, bearing witness to the desecration of 539 gravestones. Joining with Muslim, Quaker and Christian neighbors, people of faith and conscience, our hands in the earth restoring headstones, as...
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Mob vs. Movement: Ki Tisa and the Power of the People

A group of people, fighting for a cause. It seems powerful, it seems romantic, it seems like the way to build a movement and achieve progress. But what distinguishes a movement from a mob? Five weeks ago, we stood together in shul and listened to the parshah’s recounting of the Torah’s climactic moment: the receiving...
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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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Praying That God Is Not Nauseous

“The land vomits you out?!” one of my congregants in my weekly parshah class exclaimed. We were learning parshat Behar. I was trying to explain the conditions in which we are allowed by God to dwell in the land of Israel. In order to dwell in the land we must act with holiness, following God’s...
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Redigging the wells

In the struggle over democracy, it is not just about big ideas, levers of power, or sums of money: It is about human lives.
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In Time of Upheaval: Wonder & Awe OR Wealth & Wall?

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel taught that there are two ways of being in the world: “the way of expediency” and “the way of wonder.” In the former, we seek to take what we can from the world and others; in the latter, our focus is on how we can serve. When we are driven by...
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The House Is Still On Fire

The Torah this week introduces us to Abraham and Sarah, our soon-to-be parents of monotheism. Each year, I find the call from God familiar, yet still chilling: ‘lech l’cha,’ get up and leave your place of familiarity and comfort to journey to this new place, one that you don’t know, but which will help to...
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