Sermons

Shabbat Shalom

     We hear about all kinds of denominations in Judaism. There is Conservative, Orthodox, Reform, Reconstructionist, Humanistic, Hasidic, Lubavitcher, several distinct types of Sephardic Judaism, and Spiritual Judaism. Each group practicing Judaism in their own way. But when I was in Rabbinical School, quite a while ago, we were taught that there were...Read more...

 Shabbat Shalom

     In Judaism we like to think we have a blessing for everything. There is a blessing when you meet a great Torah Scholar. There is a blessing to recite when you meet a person with worldly wisdom. There is a blessing to be recited when you meet a head of state. There is a blessing to recite when you meet someone of exceptional beauty. And then...Read more...

Hag Sameach.

     The man sitting next to me, upon discovering that I was a rabbi, wanted to know if I were like the rabbis in Crown Heights who believed that God would protect them from COVID. I replied, “I do believe that God protects us from COVID, that is why God gave us the knowledge and the intelligence to create the vaccines.”

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Shabbat Shalom and Hag Sameach

     Today is Jewish Independence Day. Not Israel’s Independence Day, which will be on the fifth day of Iyar, next month. This is the day that the family of Jacob, the People of Israel, the people who were slaves in Egypt, woke up in the morning, after a tense night of watching, to discover that Pharoah had not only freed them from...Read more...

Shabbat Shalom

     Every person in this room, who has ever been a parent knows the plaintive cry of the young child asking, “But why?!” From our earliest childhood, we all have a need to understand the world and to see how it all works, even behind the scenes. It is this question, “Why?” that has moved humanity forward in history. Most animals just take the...Read more...

Shabbat Shalom

      I am having my doubts about self-driving cars. My current car is already telling me what I should do when I am driving. It is one thing to let me know that a door is open. But my car tells me when something is too close to my car. It tells me when it thinks I am too close to the car in front of me. It tells me when there is a car in my blind...Read more...

Refugee Shabbat

Shabbat Shalom

     What kind of a world do we live in where a whole people are forced out of their homes and out of the country of their birth with the choice of leaving or being re-educated to fit in with everyone else? Give up your cultural heritage or get out of our country; what kind a choice is that. The point here is that I am not...Read more...

     The singing group, “The Loving Spoonful” released a song in 1965 called, “Did You Ever Have To Make Up Your Mind”. It would be a great theme song for this week’s Parsha. In both the Torah reading and the Haftara reading, the people of Israel are having trouble making up their mind.

     In Exodus, for example, the people had just heard...Read more...

Captives of Hope  --- Essay from the Jewish Forward

     This essay is adapted from the sermon that Rabbi Angela Buchdahl delivered last Friday night at Central Synagogue in Manhattan. Buchdahl, Central’s senior rabbi, fielded two cellphone calls last Saturday from Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, where a British gunman had taken a...Read more...

Shabbat Shalom

     On the one hand, Sisterhood Shabbat is a relic of the past, when women had a second-class role in the synagogue, and this was their only path to community leadership. They tell a story that when Mathilda Schechter, the wife of the chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary and the...Read more...

Shabbat Shalom

     Moses begins this week’s parsha disappointed. Not only did Pharoah reject his demand to let the Israelite slaves go, but just asking to free the slaves has made the slave life more difficult. Like any good despot, Pharoah figures that if the slaves have time to contemplate freedom, then they are not working hard enough. So, he demands they keep...Read more...

     The parsha this week is called “Vayechi” which means, “and he lived” referring to Jacob who is now living in Egypt. But the Torah, when it uses any form of the verb “to live” in a title, it generally means that someone is about to die. And true to form, both Jacob and Joseph die in this week’s parsha

     This is not the Torah expressing a lie, this is what we call a...Read more...

Hag Urim Sameach, Hodesh Tov and Shabbat Shalom

     I was speaking to a reporter last week about Hanukkah and the subtext that hovered around our conversation is that Hanukkah is a children’s holiday. While I do not deny that there is a lot for children in our celebration of this Festival of Lights, the real meaning of Hanukkah is not kid stuff. Sometimes, in the lighting of colored candles, spinning dreidels and...Read more...

Shabbat Shalom

The rivalry between brothers that is the core of this week’s Parsha is legendary; twin boys who are locked in a sibling rivalry that seems to know no bounds. Jacob has the brains; Esau has the brawn. Jacob is clever in how he dupes his brother, but he knows that one small step over a line and Esau could crush him. Of course, at the prodding of his mother, Jacob steals the...Read more...

Shabbat Shalom

In our Parsha, God reveals to Abraham that the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah are to be destroyed because of their great wickedness. Rabbinic legend is filled with stories of the kind of evil that was in these twin cities. They were filled with cruelty to strangers, oppression of the orphan, the widow and the powerless. These evil cities used the law to perform acts of injustice. Pirke Avot...Read more...