The mood swing from Yom Kippur to Sukkot is among the most dramatic of Jewish transitions. From sobriety to celebration, from awe-struck fear to total joy, from fasting to feasting, we re-engage with the world beyond the walls of synagogue, remembering...

So you got fat [Deut. 32:15], G*d would have suckled you with honey from a rock and oil from a flinty stone butter of cattle milk or sheep fat of lambs, but you became thick and you kicked. Of course, we will get fat if we eat like that. The honey alone...

“Hayom Harat Olam!” “Today is the birthday of the world!” We often hear or say these words during our services on Rosh Hashanah, particularly when we hear the sound of the shofar. “Happy birthday, world,” we say when we try to explain in...

As we find ourselves in the seventh month of the “new normal” of COVID-19 and near the beginning of the New Year 5781, one of the most popular catch phrases has become, “We’re all in this together.” This statement is intended to awaken within...

Devarim - Chapter 26: 1: When you enter the land that the Lord your God is giving you as a heritage, and you possess it and settle in it, 2: You shall take some of every first fruit of the soil, which you harvest from the land that the Lord your God...

Sometimes, the only way to remember is to forget. True, most of us worry when we begin to forget things that we once easily remembered. We fear our own loss of cognitive function and that of our loved ones, knowing that the decline of mental acuity and,...

One of our esteemed and notable local rabbis once told a class of beginning adult students that there is no topic that Torah fails to address. Generation by generation, rabbinic minds took an ancient narrative and crafted a never-ending story. We have...

“See, behold, I set before you today a blessing and a curse.” (Sefer Devarim, Chapter 11, Verse 26)The brilliant and iconoclastic Hassidic Master, Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav (1772-1810), shares an insightful and powerful interpretation of the opening...

Carl Sagan once said, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” In other words, none of us have ever done anything by ourselves.  Anything that we manage to achieve is possible only because we find ourselves...

“To comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” I was in a rabbinical school class when I first heard this adage. The saying was proffered by a professor as a working definition of Prophecy in the Hebrew Bible — or TaNaK (an acronym for...

The last book of the Torah is a multilayered narrative opening with an experienced Moses reminding a new generation of Israelites about the challenges their parents faced as they left a narrow place of ancient Egyptian servitude. The Book of Deuteronomy...

Matot is the word for tribes in the opening verse. We have another word for tribe: shevet. Matei (singular) and shevet both signify a branch, a staff, part of a tree, how a branch becomes a tribe. I am thinking about this as I stoop to kiss the ground...