Using the interpretations of the Rabbis (including Nachmanides and Sefer HaYashar) to understand Joseph's assimilation (in name, dress, etc.), I compare him to an American hero very recently in the news!  I can't say more without ruining the suspense...

Yaakov's famous wrestling scene and renaming as Yisrael --one who wrestles with God and prevails-- is often understood as Yisrael wrestling with God as his opponent.  The Rabbis point out how problematic this is, since the opponent is listed as a "man," not as God.  Therefore some of the Rabbis see it this way:  the wrestling opponent looks identical to Esav, being his guardian angel (Rashi) or his projection, and wrestling "with God" (im elohim) means wrestling with God as a supportive...

Is it right to use arable land --often very expensive in populated areas -- for graves, then pollute the environment by keeping them "dignified" through maintenance and pesticides, with the hollow promise of "perpetual care," and say this is all required by Jewish Law, when Jewish Law itself is the source of the requirement for eco-decomposition and of prohibitions against costly burial?  I explicate the sources using the Conservative Movement's oficial responsum, "Alternative Kevura Methods"...

In this ten minute teaching I used to begin the 10 Days of Awe, I connect several teachings.  The first is the Rabbinic teaching that following a calamity upon a village, one should try to give the luxury rations to those who are used to luxury because being unaccostomed to hardship, their anguish might be even greater than others' though we are tempted to believe the opposite.  The second is that during Yom Kippur, we approach ourselves and our relationships in a state of aninut, of...

Is the Jewish concept of history that of linear progress, or that of Ecclesiastes' cyclical vanity?  This teaching was delivered during a 12-Step friendly Serenity Shabbat.

The theology of the haftarot of the exile prophets like Deutero-Isaiah is hard for most people to relate to:  "You are in exile, your life is full of tragedy, and I love you, I remember you as you were before, but I won't be getting you out of the situation you got yourself in, and which I warned you repeatedly about."  This is the kind of "unloving" God that Christian theologians for millenia have accused Jews of having.  Yet do those in Al-Anon understand it in a way they can teach us?  

For too long, Jews have associated the Recovery movement with Christianity, and we have seen those in recovery, or with addictions, as outsiders to Torah.  This is far from reality.  The main example of vows-of-change --the essence of High Holidays-- in the Torah itself is the vow to abstain from alcohol and other intoxicants, involving emulating priestly service and separating for a period from one's family and social triggers.  The very process of High Holiday teshuvah is recognizing our...

My Yom Kippur sermon in 2022.  Using Ethan Kross's book Chatter along with Jewish sources and my own observations about life, I challenge us to form our relationship to God through our relationship with our inner voice, which these days tends to be taken over by CHATTER, the stress brought on by the takeover of our inner God voice through the Satan voice.  It's time we challenge it head on.

I share Ilana Kurshan's teaching on rabbinic midrash seeing Moses as a mother in transition, as they question whether, at the promised land border, God's refusing his entry is frustrating his desire to mother the people more, or frustrating his desire to claim "his turn" to actually have a life now that the children are leaving the nest.  I include my own glosses, but make no mistake that this is Ilana Kurshan's teaching.

In this d'var Torah, I discuss how parashat Eikev is the section of Torah most frought with ambivalences, from the text itself through the Rabbinic commentaries: blessing as bounty and overextension, independence and dependence, hardship and privilege, closeness and distance. I relate this to our lives directly in the examples of the college experience and of our relationship with God.

There is a crisis for our middle and high school students that has reached desperate proportions: they don't believe in God and they see our tradition as having nothing relevant to say about what God could be to them. Typical of immigrant cultures, we have answered them for generations that they need not worry because it's a glorious thing that Judaism allows you to be an ethical atheist. Yet is this answer best for them, or, easiest for us? Our middle and high schoolers are riddled with...

Drawing on the Rabbinic principle that Passover celebrates our freedom --which is a temporary state that leads to service in covenant, I use 12-step principles to state my thesis:  the only freedom a human being has is in choosing whom we serve and in choosing to live with God as the 3rd party in that service.

How do we relate to the Torah's insistence that the kohanim who do the major rituals be without blemish or disability?  Isn't that grossly ableist?  I suggest the following.  First, the Torah is not an idealistic description of a utopia of saints -- it forces us to recognize truths about human nature, and then create a society for real people like us, so it forces us to recognize our own prejudices and ableism, which are also active today.  Second, there is a serious issue at stake involving...

In this presentation, I present the Talmudic sources on Judaism's discussion of the status of the fetus, and I argue that what's been missing from the discussion --including the discussion of Jewish views -- is the fact that Judaism leaves open what the status of the fetus is between 40 days and full viability, but importantly assigns the process to the mother. Men have no say in it.  In other words, the issue is not freedom of religion in the sense of one denomination versus another, but...

One of my "standing on one foot while answering a humungous theological question" podcasts.  "Rabbi, what do we mean by miracles?  What is up with the Red Sea splitting?"  I give my on-one-foot 5 minute answer, but we should all go and study (as Hillel famously said after answering his on-one-foot answer) afterward. By the way, I refer to seeing a red butterfly in the answer:  at a funeral and shivah I officiated at, it came up repeatedly that a butterfly would show up in their lives just at...

At the same time as the Torah turns its pages to describe the creation and pattern of the Temple, with men, women, and children mixed together, and the haftarah describes the construction of the Temple in Jerusalem as the same, the Israeli government reneges on the Kotel Agreement to provide a separate space for mixed gender worship near the Wailing Wall, even while turning over the Wall officially to ultra extremist fundamentalist Jews who claim that the inclusion of women --or women leading...

While Judaism demands that one does not judge oneself too harshly, nor live in a place of self-defeating criticism, nevertheless there's a vital role for self-judgment to play in our learning from the past to walk with God and expand our ability to channel holiness into the world.  In fact, since God loves us as we are, and even provides a Shabbat that makes us feel that the world is made for us as we are, it is vital we judge ourselves, because that's not the job God wants, nor is it the job...

The Talmud tells us that the first great act of God's love (chesed, lovingkindness) was making clothing for Adam and his wife.  Do we return the favor?

Joseph's dreams seem to predict the future and his role in it.  So does God have a plan for us?

The source sheet I'm reading from is at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1R0Txiy6QvQiHo40hKSsHyafLernFjS8tXp0tJo7gPWA/edit?usp=sharing This is a lecture to give the listener the Rabbinic sources that create distinctions and legal status for decisions around the criminalization of elective abortion, as discussed in the Supreme Court hearings.

Here I tease out the following ideas of bell hooks: 1. Our society valuing power over others as the paramount value, and rooted in the psychology of men. 2. This value playing out in drama as "the protagonist" as the center around which others must revolve, and often the only one whose name counts. 3. Oppositional gaze: the one who owns their justice perspective is the one who has the power to gaze at injustice [like Moses having the privilege to "gaze" at the taskmaster beating a Hebrew...

Robert Bly, one of America's great poets and poetry translators, recently died.  In this presentation, I apply Bly's books of social commentary to the end of Genesis.  Iron John described the effects of fathers turning over parenting duties to others --like the wrong-headed "kids learn from interacting with other kids" rather than with parents.  It also argued for the simultaneous absence of initiative rites in American society.  In The Sibling Society, Bly argued that American society...

These are my reflections upon Arnold Eisen's 2015 essay, "Joseph, Hanukkah, and the Dilemmas of Assimilation."  Those who investigate the Hanukkah story quickly learn (simply by reading the Books of Maccabees in the apocrypha) that the events around the 186 BCE revolt of the Maccabees against the Hellenizing-Syrians do not involve a miracle of oil.  Rather, following the decree by Antiochus IV that the Temple in Jerusalem be dedicated to Hellistic religion, the Maccabees first attack...

[WARNING: The second half of the podcast discusses the rape of Dinah and I share an account of sexual harrassment from recent congressional testimony.] If the early chapters of Genesis are about where we come from, the second half of Genesis is about the experiences that change us, that make us who we are as adults, not through our own achievements but through what happens to us, from tragedy to transcendence, from rejection to love, from struggles with mental health, sexual harrasment,...

In this sermon -- playing on the Rabbinic commentary that the name of the Torah portion that mentions Sarah's death is called "The Life [or Lives] of Sarah" because we should celebrate the lives she lead rather than think of her death-- I discuss Dara Horn's new book People Love Dead Jews, which argues that the non-Jewish world loves books about Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel because the stories of these dead Jews teaches us something universal and moralistic about ourselves, rather than...