Sermons
One of the strangest, most difficult and at times most exciting responsibilities of being a rabbi is preparing and delivering a sermon. It is a strange form of communication, almost completely “one way,” with little opportunity for the congregation to respond or for the rabbi to know how it was received. The blank sheet of paper before beginning to write is so daunting: what should I talk about? What should I say about it? How should I say it? But looking back now over forty years of sermons, I realize that being required to stand up in front of the congregation and open my mouth and speak has forced me to think deeply about my own life, Judaism, and our world. Below are many recent sermons and some of the sermons from the past which capture important moments in my life, or the life of our community or the world.
1st Sermon at CBB
August 6, 2004
here is what I have realized after 47 years of learning: the very best thing I can do is to listen carefully to all of my teachers, to all of you here tonight and to everyone else I have mentioned, and then to go to myself, to find a way, a time and a place to become still, and to listen to the voice of my own heart. And that is the way I will learn to do this job.
After 9/11 WTC Attacks
September 17, 2001
This year the entire world is observing Rosh HaShanah. In a single hour, last Tuesday’s terrorist attack brought us all immediately to the central concerns of this season. Not just the Jews, and not just the United States. The entire world has been living for a week now with the fundamental existential questions posed by our Days of Awe: Mi yich-yeh umi yamut? Who shall live and who shall die?
Barefoot on Yom Kippur
Yom Kippur 1998
make no mistake: the authentic Judaism that is alive, and which has kept us alive as a people, is a physical faith...acted out in the realm of our bodies and the material world. We will only find the fire at the core of Judaism in mitzvot, physical practices which we enact with our hands, our mouths, our feet, our bodies.
On Halakha
Pacific Association of Reform Rabbis, June 1995
I am trying to sing a much more complicated Jewish song than my parents did and perhaps am singing it with much less grace and beauty than they sang, and continue to sing, that simple folksong. But after a person learns the easy songs, they do crave the challenge of something more difficult. That is where I am personally--caught between a childhood of simple, touching Judaism and a vision of a wonderfully complex and demanding ideal.
Two Kinds of Solitude
Yom Kippur 1994
Yom Kippur, this Day of Atonement, is about both kinds of solitude. On this day we reject the loneliness which we create. We resolve and act to reach out across the distance which we have set between ourselves and the people of our lives.
And on this Day of Atonement, we embrace the first solitude - the aloneness which is at the heart of being human.
Fasting on Yom Kippur
Yom Kippur 1993
The traditional greeting on Yom Kippur, ironically, is “Have an easy fast.” That is the voice of reasonable, common sense Judaism. Tonight I won’t wish you that; I wish you a heart-breaking fast.
Sexual Ethics
Yom Kippur 1986
We Jews, when confronted with ethical problems, have traditionally turned to the Torah for guidance. It is one of the great failures of Judaism in our day that the Torah, and those who teach it, have not been very helpful when it come to the modern dilemmas of whom to have sex with, and when.