Authentic, Compassionate Judaism For The Thinking Person

How do we reopen the synagogue after over a year of being virtual?  For some it's procedural:  distance appropriately, follow guidelines, limit numbers, maybe wait on the food.  But the Temple is not a gathering of bodies, it's a gathering of souls.  How do we reopen appropriately to be a holy community, one that recognizes each other as souls?  One of my favorite mishnayot speaks to this, and I was happy to be scooped by Professor Naomi Kalish in applying it to us today:  https://www.jtsa.edu/struggling-to-celebrate   There are four categories of people who went up the downstaircase at the Temple, and down the up staircase:  the one in mourning, the one caring for a relative, the one who has been isolated, and the one who has lost a precious object.   In this Dvar Torah on Emor, I apply these to our norms for a holy reopening. Helpful picture: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Huldah_Gates3344.JPG

Leviticus ends with a long list of horrifying predictions (or curses) of the vicious suffering of the Israelites when they eventually enter the Land and break the covenant.  Western Civilization has been shaped by European Christian intellectuals who created the unchallenged image (and therefore a Western bias) that the God of the Old Testament is a God who is disposed toward anger and punishment, who seems to enjoy punisment and retribution (and thus God had to be made flesh in the Son to introduce Love).  In this podcast, I ask us to hear these verses as the words of the Mother, who, as in Wendell Berry's poem (which I read at the end) sees the Mother foreseeing one's sins, suffering in that foreknowledge with you, before you, with love and forgiveness already there symbolized by the made bed, the "you can always come home" that transcends the future into the past.  Is the angry God we project, really the No-God of Jeremiah, the idol of our own making, which externalizes our own anger at climate change, soc

Is Leviticus's insistence that those with skin afflictions (as well as having buried the dead) not go to Temple an exclusionary punishment for being sick?  Or is that our modern reading which presumes that religion is exclusionary and judgmental?  In this presentation, I use Ross Douthat's essay "Can the Meritocracy Find God? The secularization of America probably won’t reverse unless the intelligentsia gets religion" as a way to talk about America's prejudices against religion, and my particular concern that even Jewish leaders like me are too silent in the face of the current hype that all the cool innovation (and funding) is happening outside of our legacy institutions [which actually is an unchallenged claim mainly by people who don't go to synagogue] and that our success as communities should be judged as to how easy we make it for unaffiliated Jews to get their needs met without having to attend the Temple as it exists in our day.  Is that respectful of the Temple?

As the percentage of Jews opting for cremation has risen from around 2% to over 20% in twenty years, how do we balance the mitzvah of burial of Jewish remains with the prohibition on cremation?

Inspired by the teachings of the great American ceramicist, Richard DeVore, I examine what the mishkan tells us about the nature of artistic composition, drawing a stark contrast between Golden Calves and Purposeful Composition, in Exodus, and especially in how we live our lives. 

What were the Keruvim, the two hybrid beast angels 10 cubits high protecting the Ark of the Covenant, and from between whom God speaks?  I rehearse all the theories, and end with a Maimonidean vision of what the angel as an extension of God's presence really is.

Given that some of the most influential narratives and Torah legislation are but a few verses long, why is so much of the book of Exodus chapters and chapters of detailed, repetitive descriptions of the instructions and building of the Tabernacle (Mishkan), the priestly uniforms, the utensils, the hundreds of curtain rods and hooks?  I answer this question through my reflecting on the observations of Henry Louis Gates in his PBS Series (during Black History month) on the history of the Black Church in America.  

No statement by God seems more morally challenging than the prophet Samuel's demand for the complete annhilation of the Amalekites and their animals, followed by his condemnation of Saul for failing to kill King Agag and the choicest of the animals.  The Amalekites are equated with the nature of evil itself, and so the resurgence of evil and especially genocidal anti-Semitism throughout the rest of time is somehow linked to the failure to "complete the job" of vanquishing them earlier on.  In this very brief teaching, I try to learn a lesson we might otherwise resist from this troublesome piece of Tanakh:  the tendency to fail to complete the job, often through unacknowledged selfish interest that hides beneath the seemingly noble action of "moving on."

In this 5 minute teaching, I read a poem by Zbigniew Herbert and then share a seriously short spiritual practice that involves receiving the deepest of advice.  In that, I connect the prayer Hashkiveinu to the Mourners Kaddish to my own experience of practicing it.

As America faces what to do and think about impeachment, I reflect on the dramatic difference between the book of Jonah and account of the final plagues in Exodus where God hardens Pharoah's heart.  In the former, God is so anxious to accept an apology, move on, and look to the future that Jonah wants to refuse God's service, and in the other God prevents the moving on that Moshe is so anxious to get to.

Parashah Bo repeatedly connects the memory of slavery to the establishment of Jewish rituals for all time, from the main features of the Passover seder to the First Fruit offerings in the Temple to ones we forget to associate with the memory of slavery like tefillin.  (Later, even Shabbat will be firmly connected to the memory of slavery.)  We in America have done the opposite by divorcing our institutions from the memory of slavery:  case in point, the Filibuster which was not a patriotic institution of the founding fathers but rather an attempt to preserve slavery by Southern senators, and then to preserve Jim Crow laws.  So should we destroy our American institutions because of these connections?  Are we to be anarchists?  No, the Torah tells us to connect the memory of slavery to taking action in this world to make God's dream for us come true.  That's our imperative.  Reconnect our institutions to their roots so we can be open to what it is God is dreaming for us, what God is dreaming for America.

I examine the sin of Geneivat Daat -- theft of another's consciousness through words that might be parse-able but lead another to think something is true which isn't-- as the prevalent sin in a world of fragmented media tailored to incite us, and I relate this to former Jewish Theological Seminar chancellor Arnold Eisen's insight that we readers cheer Moshe on in his riotous act in the name of justsice, only to wonder how we found ourselves in that dubious moral place. 

The saga of Yosef is about dreaming beginning to end, with the parashah of Miketz as itself operating according to dream logic.  Are dreams special in the Torah, unlike ours, as some kind of prophecy?  Or is much of Genesis calling our attention to the God world all around us, the one we only know through "knowledge by inacquaintance" (Abraham Joshua Heschel)?  Is it telling us that our conventional "common denominator" way of processing and understanding the world is flawed, limited, one of not knowing God is in this place, that other souls are in this place?  How do we get there?   And how could we possibly when we deprive our teenagers, our children, ourselves of sufficient sleep to even align ourselves with the world our dreams teach us to enter in Torah consciousness?

I relate Jacob's dream of the stairway to heaven and his dream of God-wrestling to the therapeutic uses of psilocybin to treat PTSD, depression, addiction, and end-of-life fear.  

The stories of Jacob being defrauded by Lavan are taken to be the plot of the famous period of Jacob working for Lavan for 20 years before fleeing in the middle of the night.  In this teaching, I show that this is a misunderstanding.  Jacob has worked for 20 years for Lavan without being paid, but only 6 of those years are for Jacob and his arrangements with Lavan!  The first 7 years are to earn money that goes directly to Leah, and the next 7 years are for the money that goes to Rachel!  The story is about THEIR being defrauded!  Why does everyone miss this?  The reason is that we misunderstand Jewish marriage:  when we read a Ketubah, when we read the literal meanings of the Jewish ceremony, we presume this is an acquisition of the woman like she's property being transferred from father to husband.  But that's a misreading:  the dowry --which comes from the father or from the woman herself-- is added to the "bride price" (money paid by the man), and the sum of these are then given to the woman in a kind of

Does our system -- oaths of office, public promises, judicial decisions-- depend on fear of punishment or a different kind of fear [a reverence for God]?  Why do I not cheat on my taxes?  Why do I make excuses for policies that benefit me, and even double down on them?  The commentary on the lying of Isaac (and Avraham) written by Rabbi Yitzchak ben Moshe Arama, the "Aqedat Yitzchak," from late 1400's Spain, gives us a clue how to proceed forward in repairing out broken system.

Jewish law demands we bury our dead, yet human nature is to "protect the mourner in their grief" by distancing them from doing the act themselves.  Jewish law follows suit by, over time, taking the demand to lovingly care for your dead and creating distance from that to "protect" the grieving.  Rehearsing Rilke's opening from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rabban Gamliel's decrees on simple loving burial (despite our natural inclination to use "do whatever rich people do" as our definition of "honoring" our dead in burial customs), the reawakening to these truths during COVID's guidelines for not touching bodies, and the archaeology of burial caves and ossuaries, I synthesize a different approach. 

The Rabbis see Sarah's laugh (at the divine prophecy of a pregnancy) as thumbing her nose at God and at her husband, now that her "period" (or "sexual enjoyment" -- edna could be translated as either) has ended "in the way of women" at a certain age.  I've always found the Rabbis overwrought in their interpretation of Sarah's laugh, but in this podcast I take it seriously.  I use the article (I just discovered) of Sandra Tsing Loh from The Atlantic in October 2011 called:  "The Bitch Is Back: Are menopausal women mad, bad, and dangerous? Yes—but they’re really just returning to normal."  It's a review of Dr. Christiane Northrup's landmark book The Wisdom of Menopause.  In that landmark book, the "thumb your nose at the expectations of your husband and of others" experiences of perimenopause are not looked at in their typical negative light, but rather as a "coming into your own" as a woman, knowing what matters for yourself, unwilling any longer to comply with the expectations of others.  This is the way I s

This is a full-on "sermon" (delivered on Rosh Hashanah, "the Birthday of the World," in 2020) in which I look frankly upon the Sarah and Hagar narratives -- mistress and slave/servant/mother-- through the lens of the issues of "privilege" we are processing today.  Schleiermacher -- among the half dozen most influential theologians in Western thought-- correctly argued that a certain consciousness of the gift of life is the fundamental basis of all true religion, leading to humility, passion, grace, and a connection to God-- yet in the Genesis narratives it does not lead to all these great things, it instead leads to an unfeeling competition for resources, and deep division.  Sound like America today?  I take us through the intricacies of the narratives, of the interplay of power and powerlessness, of the nub of this country's divisions through one true story from my life, and to a potential spiritual resolutation through another true story from my life, ending with Hannah (the haftarah on Rosh Hashanah) break

Shemini Atzeret has the special distinction of being all of the following:  1) The only holiday that has no official traditional explanation.  (Atzeret means some form of gathering, but we are left to speculate whether it's a special harvest ingathering, or a human gathering at the end of Sukkot, or a kind of makeup "extra day" of Sukkot for those who arrived late, but all these are speculative:  no reason is given.)  2)  It's still one of the four High Holidays (the others being Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot) and is a real holiday unto itself, and 3) It concluded the High Holiday period.  One dwells in the sukkah but does not say a blessing for doing so.  Shemini Atzeret is very special and odd. In this short podcast, I try to explain it as the confluence of different ways of experiencing time.  Biblical scholars for decades have reflected on how the book of Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) views time as circular while the Torah and Prophets view time as linear (leading to a Messianic horizon).  In this podca