February 11, 2022

We heard these stories from our mother’s mouth, three of us children sitting together with her on the sofa, her arms around us, the scent of her perfume in our nostrils.  Our mother loved us by reading to us. 

January 14, 2022

the Harlem Cultural Festival in the summer of 1969 was not an arrival at destination for Black America.  There was and there still is such a long journey ahead.  But it was a moment of redemption.  In that time and place, our black brothers and sisters saw and walked through a parting of the waters.  They sang and they danced, and they believed in God’s redemptive power.  Yes, they sang. “Oh Happy Day.” 

Yom Kippur 2021

         In one of our religion’s most brilliant flashes of insight, Yom Kippur teaches us the awesome liberating, therapeutic power of a conversation.

August 27, 2021

She wrote “The New Colossus” at age 34 and the poem “The New Year” when she was 33. She passed from this world when she was 38. What profound teachings about the meaning of America were lost to us when Emma Lazarus died? What passionate visions of the Jewish future might she have shown us had she lived?

March 12, 2021

To find the apple in the Exodus story, we need to go deep into Jewish folklore….beyond the written Torah….to stories of Egypt that were told by word of mouth, across the centuries, around campfires, by storytellers. There, in that bottomless well of Jewish memory and imagination, there was an apple tree in Egypt, and it is remembered in a verse from the Biblical book of love poetry, Song of Songs. “Under the apple tree, I aroused you.” Tachat hatapuach orarticha. “Under the apple tree, I aroused you.”

Friday night, January 8, 2021

After the January 6 Capitol riot

Our nation suffered a heart attack this week; can we change our national, political lifestyle? Can we become healthy again? Can we ever hope to create a government with well-functioning institutions, which is more or less trusted by most of its citizens?

October 24, 2020

This is the story that we Jews are telling this week, just as we have told it every year at this time, for three thousand years. I tell it to our kids, and to myself, because it reminds me that I am part of something old and vast. I will tell it even to little children, because this story is a good way to learn that we human beings have seen trouble before; we have experienced countless times in which the world felt strange and unstable all around us.

Yom Kippur 2020

As more and more singers joined their friends, I saw an emotional tsunami gathering force before my eyes: one after another, exquisite voices, hopeful, serious, profound young faces, each one singing out of their isolation, their voices somehow joining together, in heartbreaking harmonies, all against the tragic background of a great country brought to its knees by a terrifying modern day plague. Helplessly Hoping.

June 26, 2020

The job of being a rabbi has been the great honor and privilege of my life.  But it’s a job that never ends.  From early in the morning until late at night.  The sadness and the joy, the weight of the past and the questions about the future.  And all of the people! tiny children, hormonal teenagers, stressed out parents, aging seniors.   All with desires, needs and opinions!  There is nothing more exciting, nothing more interesting, nothing more holy than what happens in this community.  But a rabbi needs to rest.

Friday night, June 5, 2020

After the murder of George Floyd

Tonight I want to propose that if we hope for a livable world for ourselves and for our children, we must consider Rabban Shimon’s three pillars: truth, justice and peace. In that order.

May 8, 2020

I felt a huge wave of sadness wash over me, as I watched everyone on the screen and heard only myself.  That was such a lonely moment, and I thought I don’t know if I can sustain this for months and months and months.  If I can’t find people to sing with, I’ll go crazy! Then I went out to my backyard and sat quietly and listened to the birds, and slowly realized that I was surrounded by living, singing, praying voices.   

April 24, 2020

This is our family, in Israel, living through the coronavirus. The tiny baby in her flat in Tel Aviv, dreaming and her parents longing for their families. Yishay Ribo, singing for us to the entire world, ancient questions out of our tradition that have come back to life, in our day. What is God teaching us? How do we come back together, and when? And the children of Kibbutz Gezer, singing and dancing with their popsicles on a hot corona day.

Friday night, March 27 2020

This year the old Passover story, out of our distant past, is suddenly speaking directly to us. Not only to us, the Jewish people, but to all of us, the entire Human Family.

November 22, 2019

At these times it is best to find a quiet place, to become still and to empty our mind.... of every thought, of every argument. We empty our heart and our mind. Then, in simplicity and sincerity, we ask. We relax. We open ourselves to receive an answer.

October 27, 2019

The problem with death is not that we want to live forever.  After a long life, we all need to rest.  The problem with death is that we are taken from the people we love. .. in the course of our lifetime, our soul becomes completely intertwined with other human souls.  …We become so thoroughly enmeshed with each other that when death takes us from each other,… we are overcome with grief.

Yom Kippur 2019

Malala Yousafzai, Emma Gonzalez and Greta Thunberg have each spoken in a voice that has reached across the entire planet....before reaching the age of 18 years old. Each one of them, sadly but not surprisingly, has thousands of people who hate them and are trying to destroy them. Somehow, fear does not seem to affect them. Like the prophets of ancient Israel, each one of these young women speaks for something far beyond themselves. Something that I believe our ancient ancestors would have understood as the holy spirit.

Rosh Hashanah 2019

This, I think, is why Richard Levy emphasized so urgently the importance of balancing our love of God with sacred fear. Richard demanded a religion that feels completely true. Completely honest. Not just the warm and fuzzy side of God, the loveable side of the Creator....but also the God that we experience as cruel, the source of suffering, and the unbearable dimensions of our lives. Today we confront everything we know about God.

June 28, 2019

Richard was a towering intellect.  A powerful, clear-eyed thinker.  And he prayed.  He spoke to us first year students openly and without embarrassment about his relationship with God.  Richard was my first living proof of the possibility of holding onto both faith and reason.  Religion and science. 

May 24, 2019

This spring marks forty years since I graduated from college. A good Biblical number. Tonight, with the benefit of forty years perspective, I would like to share what I remember about college. What was important and what was not, in my four years at Harvard.... America’s oldest and arguably most prestigious college.