It was called the Miracle on Ice. I remember watching the United States ice hockey team made up of scrappy and determined amateurs and college students defeat the Soviet Union in the Olympic semifinals. It was 1980 in Lake Placid, N.Y. The Soviet...

Not much is more disconcerting than members of one’s tribe engaging in passionately bitter and contentious arguments about leadership and hierarchy. “Who says you are the voice of this family? You don’t speak for me!” “Just because you had some...

We are told in Pirkei Avot (4:17) that there are three crowns, and “the crown of a good name surpasses them all.” This cliché, of course, has been used endlessly; yet, it is still relevant.  In our parsha, Sh’lach L’kha, we have the renowned...

After my transfer to a new elementary school in the fourth grade, I was offered the opportunity to play a musical instrument. Music had always been a huge part of my life, whether in synagogue, which I attended each Shabbat morning with my grandfather,...

It’s been more than a year since I began reading the Torah through COVID-colored glasses. Or perhaps more aptly, I’ve been reading Torah this year through a mask. Familiar stories and concepts in the Torah read differently from home, on Zoom, streaming,...

When we enter the world of the Book of Numbers, Bamidbar, In the Wilderness, I harken back to the discomfort of my own camping experiences. There was always grumbling from me or my brother. Yet the wilderness is the place of revelation. True, its...

This Shabbat, we will read Parashat Emor from the Book of Leviticus. Like many of the other Parshiot in this Holy Sefer, Emor highlights the special responsibilities and obligations placed upon the Kohanim, the Priestly Class of Ancient Israel. One...

In Denver, I was based in the community’s nominally Jewish hospital and spent half of my time there delivering pastoral care to a wide variety of people and families.One of the areas in which I was called to specialize came as a result a need identified...

This particular Passover observance, while it may be dominated by the external expressions inspired by time-bound practices, has presented us with an opportunity to recalculate our future by recalibrating our reason for being.Most of us, myself included,...

The “Sarajevo Haggadah,” handwritten and illustrated in 14th century Spain, was probably part of the expulsion from Spain in 1492. The details of how and when it arrived in Sarajevo, now the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, are not known. But it...

Remember when we used to congregate together in our synagogues, at the Jewish Community Center, at restaurants, in movie theaters and in other such meeting places? Remember when people wearing masks were usually about to commit a crime rather than protect...

This week’s parshah, Kee Teesa, contains one of the ugliest transgressions in the long history of the Jewish people: Chet HaEgel, the sin of the forging and worshipping the Golden Calf.Quite honestly, if I had my druthers, and the chutzpah to do so,...