April 26, 2013

But listen: here is something equally difficult to understand.  In the midst of the carnage, an 82-year-old American white woman named Rosamond Carr was evacuated, wearing only her nightdress, and then returned….unbelievably…in August of the same year to establish an orphanage for children of the genocide.  She called the place “Imbabazi” meaning “a place where you will receive all the love and care a mother would give.”  Our story tonight begins in that place…in Imbabazi.

March 8, 2013

three hundred rabbis all in one building is a huge concentration of Torah, of ego, of compassion, of Jewishness, of power, of self-promotion and of humor. I was there in rabbi-land for just about two days and this is my report back to you.

Yom Kippur 2012

When we dialogue with our Muslim neighbors, we will not agree about everything.  We will disagree, sometimes passionately.  But the question is how we will disagree.  And whether we will press forward and continue to talk.

Yom Kippur 2012

Tonight I would like to explore together what it means to stop running. To courageously take a stand. That is the opposite of running away: to stand our ground.

August 10, 2012

But as long as it was still Shabbat, I had permission…in fact I was commanded…not to work.  Shabbat offers that liberation to anyone suffering from the pace of modern life. So, having nothing that I needed to do, I went to my bookshelf and pulled off a book I had bought years ago, but never read, titled The Stars: A New Way to See Them, by H.A. Rey….and began to read.

April 22, 2011

Then an electric current passed between me, and my rabbi and that girl…..and I felt the frozen earth thawing within me, and the Exodus alive inside me, and the Jewish people being born again within me.  I heard a voice calling…and I have no idea whether it was the voice of my rabbi, or the voice of the text, or the voice of God….declaring “arise, and come away.” That morning I learned what Rabbi Akiva meant when he said, “All of the books of the Bible are holy.  But the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies.”

February 8, 2011

All of this has happened so quickly that it is still too soon to understand what these changes mean for us.  Just a couple of months ago, we saw long-standing, powerful dictatorships in Egypt and Tunisia collapse in a matter of days, brought down by uprisings orchestrated on Facebook.  In the aftermath of those revolutions, it is no longer possible to regard Facebook as trivial. The social network has emerged as a powerful force in our world.  That is a fact.  But we do not know: Will it be a blessing or a curse?

March 11, 2011

We Jews have for thousands of years, been praying at a wall in Jerusalem. From her daughter Naomi, Louise learned and is now teaching us, what it means to be driven to our knees, and to pray before a wall. Shabbat Shalom.

Yom Kippur 2010

A Shabbat tablecloth, a Shabbat delicacy, a Shabbat garment, and the simplest possible Shabbat ritual of candles, wine and challah.  A humble beginning.  We don’t need a cathedral…a simple structure will do.  But we do need that.  A new Shabbat covenant, one to which we all can say “yes.” 

Rosh Hashanah 2010

Mount Moriah—mountain of yirah and r’iyah…fear and vision! What is that place to us? We are here in Santa Barbara, on the other side of the planet. What is our connection to the Kotel, and its crowds of black-hatted Jews? What is our connection to the Old City of Jerusalem, with the tense alley-ways of the Muslim Quarter and the tacky and commercialized Jewish Quarter? In fact, what is our connection with Israel? That country of traffic jams and tourist traps and lethal hatreds?

July 23, 2010

Is it OK to say such a thing? Is it OK for a rabbi to say such a thing from the bimah on Friday night? Can one speak of Shakespeare and the Torah in one breath? Is Shakespeare a kind of Torah?….Is Homer Torah?, or Dante, or Robert Frost or Emily Dickinson for that matter? I’ve wondered about that question for thirty years, and am still stuck on it. Does God speak to us through the voices of all the great human authors and teachers? Are they all Torah, or is only the Torah, Torah?

September 4, 2009

    Last week, on Thursday night, my family and I were driving home from Sequoia National Park, barreling down Route 5 and across on the 126 at night, in the dark, singing along with Leonard Cohen….all these songs and more.  Marian, Rachel, Ari and I each have our own, very different views of God, and Judaism.  Our kids are now 19 and 21.  But the four of us were there together in the dark….singing Who By Fire, Hallelujah, If it be Your Will, Anthem.  It was one of the nicest moments we have had with our children in recent memory.

December 29, 2008

That shared experience kindled a light in our group.  An old light, that burns without end.  The same light Moses saw burning and burning in the bush in the wilderness.  The same flame the Jews saw glowing from the tiny oil lamp in the Jerusalem Temple, day after day after day.  That light blazed in our midst last Wednesday night.  It was a miracle, nothing supernatural, but still a wonder…a revelation of the hidden presence of God.

August 22, 2008

There in front of us, we see a theater in which athletes are faced with our universal human task---how to cope, how to triumph over the chaotic thoughts and the stormy emotions racing every minute through our conscious and sub-conscious mind. Not to turn them off completely, but to harness them and direct their energy toward the goal line….for the athlete, the goal is the medal podium. For the rest of us, the goal is a good life.

August 15, 2008

We live in a world full of falsehood, especially in the public sphere, in which no one believes that anyone else is really what they seem to be… But for a brief time, this past Tuesday and Thursday, in the Santa Barbara courthouse, I found myself in an extraordinary situation.  There in that very public place, most of us were meeting each other for the first time.  I have no doubt that over the course of that trial, there will be plenty of spin, deception and innuendo.  But at least during the process of jury selection, I felt privileged to be sitting in a world in which words still matter, in which an oath still matters, in which the truth still matters.

March 7, 2008

One camp within our movement believes that Reform Judaism is a Judaism of reason, modernity and the enlightenment. And the other camp holds that Reform Judaism is a Judaism of personal, individual choice.

October 12, 2007

Suddenly, the story of Noah and the flood, the ark and the birds, the dove and the raven take on an entirely new set of meanings for us…the reader.  The raven’s irrefutable accusation is directed at every one of us, when we look for a scapegoat, for a bird to throw off of our ark…for the person to remove from our life.

February 9, 2007

All of us are frail.  All of us are frightened.  Even God.    We all need encouragement and we all need strength. This is why we come here, and this is why, like Moses and like Isaiah, like Sylvia Glass and like Janet Laichas, we grab hold of the fiery coal of Torah, and set it in our mouths.

Chazak chazak, v’nitchazek.  Be strong, be strong. And let us strengthen one another.

December 29, 2006

Ten measures of suffering fell upon the world, taught the ancient sages, and nine of those fell upon Jerusalem.  Ten measures of beauty fell upon the world, taught the sages, and nine of those fell upon Jerusalem.  I wouldn’t want my daughter to be spending her nineteenth year in any other city in the world.

March 30, 2005

At the Central Conference of American Rabbis

to speak of God’s unknowability is in no way to deny God’s reality. On the contrary, by insisting upon God’s unknowability, we open up a sacred empty space, a holy of holies, inside ourselves within which God can dwell and from which the voice of God can issue like fire.