I'm on my way home from five amazing days at the Hevraya retreat of the [...]
Last week's Torah portion ended with Pharaoh making a startling admission to Moses. The king of the most powerful nation on earth, who believed himself to be a [...]
This is the sermon I am giving tonight at Temple Beit HaYam.It’s a strange business, this praying that we do together on Friday nights. We gather in this sacred space and we speak words that are written in our prayerbooks that Jews all over the world have been saying together for a very long time. Some of the prayers in our siddur are more than two thousand years old. But, why? What are we d [...]
In a midrash, the rabbis teach that Pharaoh was punished for claiming to be a god (Exodus Rabbah 8:2). In a case of "let the punishment fit the crime," God sent Moses to Pharaoh with the instructions from this week's Torah portion (Va'eira): "See, I place you in the role of God to Pharaoh" (Exodus 7:1). The punishment for pretending to be a god is to be brought down by a human being whom God has designated to ac [...]
There is, at the heart of faith, a paradox. People of faith rightly recognize that not all truths emanate from material reality. We are certain, without proof or the need of it, that our lives mean more than what we can experience with our five senses. We know that we are part of a great unity that connects us to each other and that gives the universe a purpose that we can only wonder upon; we cannot know it with certa [...]
