Pekudei 5776: Finishing Exodus by Examining Our Practice of Giving (This blog was originally delivered as a sermon to the Riverway Project during Soul Food Friday on March 11, 2016) You know the feeling when you love a book so much that as the pages in your right hand get fewer and fewer, you begin getting […]

This past Tuesday Temple Israel went to the Holy Land of Fenway Park, 40 strong, for Jewish Heritage Night. As we gathered before walking together, I offered this quasi-irreverent D’var Torah, to  complement our peanuts & cracker jacks: A D’var Torah is Hebrew for “a word” of Torah. Davar means “word.”  So let’s take with us […]

In this week’s portion we encounter what is the Torah’s most unequivocal statement on economic justice.  It reads, and I’ll excerpt the passage, for the sake of brevity: Efes ki lo yih’yeh b’cha evyon – There shall be absolutely no poor among you—since Adonai your God will bless you in the land that Adonai your […]

I just finished reading Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, an extraordinary work on the travesty of mass incarceration today in the US, particularly of African Americans. I haven’t yet recovered from what Alexander achieved in this work, essentially a telling of the facts, the reality, the truth about a state of injustice that I […]

As I pray for a ceasefire to this conflict, looking back on how it flared up, I am haunted by the facts. I am haunted by the reality of Israel’s vulnerability, haunted by the prospect of a world without a Jewish State. I am haunted by the fact that Hamas continually launches missiles into Israel, targeting […]