Photo of the author, Rabbi Michaela Brown

Shavuot: Do the Act of Love

by Rabbi Michaela Brown
We can start the process of being our authentic selves and accepting others as they want to be seen before we fully understand what or why that might be.
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Photo of the author, Rabbi Marc Gruber

Behar – Bechukotai: Abolish the Minimum Wage

by Rabbi Marc Gruber
We live in a privileged society. The Torah teaches that God judges us on how we meet our societal responsibility to provide for the most vulnerable people within our society. While we enjoy the blessings [of our privilege], we fail to meet the responsibility.
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Photo of the author, Rabbi Julie Hilton Danan

Emor:  Insiders and Outsiders

by Rabbi Julie Hilton Danan
The devastating consequences of excluding “the other” reverberate through history and are particularly relevant in our current climate of nativism and xenophobia, where human beings are being exiled for their words, and the very term “inclusion” is being banished.
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Photo of the author, Rabbi Jonah Winer

Acharei Mot – Kedoshim: What Does It Mean to Be Holy? 

by Rabbi Jonah Winer
Holiness is not about attaining some kind of moral and spiritual perfection, but rather cultivating the ability to see and respond to the opportunities to live up to our highest ideals, to build that quality of readiness to meet each moment as it comes.
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Photo of the author, Rabbi Amelia Wolf

Yom HaAtzma’ut: What Is Freedom For?

by Rabbi Amelia Wolf
Freedom is never an end, nor is independence, nor is sovereignty. They are modes of existing in this world that allow us the ability to choose how we act. Are we free of Pharaoh only to set up new Pharaohs of our own? Have we achieved independence and sovereignty only to deny it to others? Have we been released from Egypt to serve ourselves?
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Photo of the author, Cantor Michael Zoosman

Yom HaShoah: When Human Rights Become “Too Political”

by Cantor Michael Zoosman
I pledge to continue the call to recognize the sanctity of life for all human beings. I vow never to be silent in the face of oppression — no matter how “political” it may seem to some.
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Photo of the author, Rabbi Lauren Tuchman

Pesach: On Moving from a Place of Fear to a Place of Love

by Rabbi Lauren Tuchman
Passover is centrally about the possibility that in a moment, things can radically change. Yet, simultaneously, radical change cannot magically stay with us. No event lasts without an intention to integrate its lessons.
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Photo of the author, Rabbi Preston ‘Pesach’ D. Neimeiser

Pesach: A Labor-Intensive Passover

by Rabbi Preston ‘Pesach’ D. Neimeiser
Labor is an intersectional value. Our identity as workers must be as indispensable to us as that of once having been slaves in Egypt.
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Photo of the author, Rabbi Noah Arnow

Vayikra: Learning We Were Wrong

by Rabbi Noah Arnow
May we hear and take seriously others’ observations of us that we have erred, and may we admit our errors, when we realize them. May our leaders take seriously their obligation to examine their own actions, and to admit and take responsibility for their unwitting mistakes.
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Photo of the author, Rabbi Elyse Wechterman

Pekudei: Learning From, Not Erasing, Our Broken Tablets

by Rabbi Elyse Wechterman
The administration is tearing apart the historical narrative of the United States, denying the verifiable truth that more people have been left out of the American dream than included in it, that brutality had a role in building this country, and that we have inherited both the gloriousness of the nation’s founding ideas and the shame of our failure to live up to them.
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