Parashat Bereishit rolls in this week to remind us that we humans are all works in progress who need each other and probably a little divine care to live into our fullest selves.  We see this clearly when we take a closer look at the sections of this...

Despite the fact that I grew up in Denver in the semiarid state of Colorado, where there were few biting insects (except for chiggers!), my family never went camping. We would have picnics in the foothills of the mountains, usually around Buffalo Bill’s...

Just before his death, G-d allowed Moses to ascend Mount Nebo and view the land of Israel from a distance. Can you picture it?  An elderly Moses, in long white robes, leaning on a staff atop a mountain, content and looking out over the land G-d promised...

Parashat Vaylech is the shortest parashah in the corpus of the lectionary, the weekly readings of the Torah as we have them in our shuls. Yet despite its brevity, it possesses several critical teachings intended not only for our ancestors, the Ancient...

I was 6 years old when Harry Chapin’s song “Cat’s in the Cradle” debuted. It resurfaced in my life during my high school youth group years. Remember sitting around a campfire during Havdalah? The song session afterward always included this iconic...

How many times have you heard the sermon about how, as Jews, we are commanded to remember and care for the widow, the orphan and the stranger because we were strangers in the land of Egypt?  Sometimes, the goal is to urge action: “Remember that...

People are often surprised and, to be fair, a little wary, when they learn the topic of my rabbinical thesis. While many of my classmates chose practical themes that would help them in their rabbinate, such as  “Judaism in the Age of iPhones” or...

At the beginning of this week’s Torah portion, Moses has finally led the Israelites across the wilderness and he turns his eyes to gaze on the Promised Land. It seems as if it should be a joyous moment, but we know that it’s actually bittersweet,...

In what many scholars, Robert Adler included, have observed, The Book of Deuteronomy (Devarim) is “…the most sustained deployment of rhetoric in the Torah”. If you go back to a previous article I wrote about the Book of Numbers, I framed this year’s...

We are dreaming peace all the time now, the evidence of that broken letter vavin the word shalom of briti shalom, covenant of peace, in Numbers 25:12, that may be what's holding it up. The vav in shalom is broken. Let's fix the vav in the...

I grew up mostly in California, and people often presume that I must have spent my whole life out communing with nature. In truth, I was never a big hiker, and I absolutely hated camping and boating. As an adult, I still hate camping, but I have...

Overheard at a store checkout line: “Ya know, I can predict the score of the next Cardinals game before the first pitch.” “You can make a ton of money betting on games. What’s the score?” “Zero to zero.” Let’s...