Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein

Taking risks is often associated with being reckless. But nothing of real worth in life can be attained without them. Every leap demands courage, and an acceptance that we are not in control. And if we can learn to embrace that, living with risk can ultimately be liberating. The Parsha of Lech Lecha opens with the act that launches all of Jewish history. God tells Abraham to leave his homeland and...

The psychological and emotional forces that shape a human being - what we call character traits - are incredibly powerful.   Left unrefined, they can undermine our relationships, our happiness and our ability to make good decisions.   But when directed properly, with awareness and intention, they can become a powerful source of growth and psychological health. The parsha of Noach describes two soc...

Three years after October 7, and at great sacrifice, Israel has, thank G-d, defeated its enemies on the battlefield. But they have not given up. Now they are using the blood libel of genocide in a relentless attempt to finish what Hamas started: the destruction of Israel.  This is a call to action for the Jewish world. Here is my speech delivered at the SAZF October 7 memorial service.  Our guest...

Do you think of yourself as a creative person? We generally associate creativity with artists, with painting and music and writing. Yet in a fundamental sense, every one of us is a creator. This week we begin the Torah again, with the parsha of Bereishit and its most radical statement about the human being: that we are created b'tzelem Elokim, in the image of God. The Rishonim understand this as o...

Surrendering to what lies beyond our control can be liberating.  Accepting our powerlessness before God can paradoxically be empowering.  The final verses of the Torah, which we read on Simchat Torah, describing the last days of Moshe's life, show us how. Vezot Habracha, the final parsha of the Torah, ends with a startling lesson. Moshe Rabbeinu, the greatest leader of the Jewish People, stands at...

Self-help is one of the most popular genres of books in the world. Walk into any bookstore and the shelves are weighed down with them. Self-development, personal growth, becoming your best self. This series has been about self-development too. Pirkei Avot is the Torah of who a person can become, what we have been calling Torah bein adam l'atzmo. But the philosophy of self-development from a Torah...

What are we actually meant to be doing on Rosh Hashanah? What are the goals of the day? What does an ideal Rosh Hashanah look like? What should be going through your mind when you are sitting in shul? The answer to these questions can completely change your experience of Rosh Hashanah this year, and, even, transform your entire life. Every Jewish festival has a clear objective. On Yom Kippur we re...

Inner strength is needed to succeed in everything in life.  But how do we build the strength we need?  Avot gives us high-impact tactics for this. And more than that, it offers a profound understanding of the nature of life itself that can give us the strength we need to overcome all the obstacles in our path. Courage is usually defined against fear. In the parsha of Vayelech it is defined against...

Understanding that feelings of guilt come from the depth of the soul, can empower us to transform the discomfort they bring into a catalyst for personal change and new beginnings. This understanding comes from understanding the deeper meaning of teshuva, which is often mistranslated as repentance. Repentance comes from the Latin for penitence, meaning remorse and regret. The same root gives us pen...

What does it mean to be spiritually healthy? The Rambam was a physician as well as one of our greatest sages. In his introduction to Pirkei Avot, he draws a remarkable parallel between the health of the body and the health of the soul, describing the sages themselves as "doctors of the soul." But spiritual illness presents a unique problem. When something distorts our character or the way we see t...

Over the course of this journey through Pirkei Avot, we have been piecing together its vision of the human being: how we think, the character we develop, the choices we make, and the responsibility we take for the world around us. In Part 6, those pieces come together around one of life's most fundamental questions: What does it actually mean to succeed? We naturally measure a life by what someone...

In this episode the journey we have been on together over this series takes an unexpected twist. It turns out that Avot is not only about who we become. It is also about leadership. And it changes what that means for each of us in a way that makes it relevant for how we live every day. One of the most famous lines in Pirkei Avot is Hillel's question: if I am only for myself, what am I? Many of us...

Why has the Jewish people always stood alone? Recorded on the night of Tisha B'Av, this shiur begins with a simpler question: what does it actually mean to mourn? The grief turns out to be only the surface of it. Underneath sits something else, the very aloneness the day is built to make you feel. It's there in the halachot that shape Tisha B'Av, in the law that forbids a mezumen at the seudah ham...

Personal mourning fades with time. Our national mourning, the Three Weeks leading into Tisha B'Av, on the other hand, move in the opposite direction. It grows more intense until a day described as "sitting shiva for the world itself." Why would we deliberately awaken grief for a loss most of us have never personally experienced? Drawing from Rabbi Yosef Dov Soloveitchik, Rabbeinuyu Bechaye, Pirkei...

Why do we spend three weeks manufacturing grief for a building none of us ever saw? This is the question the Chief puts directly to his audience in this year's Shemiras Halashon shiur, delivered the Shabbos before Tisha B'Av - a program he has been part of given every year for over two decades. The laws of communal mourning work backwards from the laws of personal mourning. Grief for a relative st...

Few aspects of human relationships are more uncomfortable than criticism, whether giving it or receiving it. Yet we cannot grow without it. If we are to become better people, we have to recognise our mistakes, learn from them, and change. The question is not whether criticism has a place in our lives, but whether we know how to give it and receive it well. This week's parsha, Devarim, begins with...

We instinctively look for the quickest most efficient path from where we are to where we want to be. But life rarely unfolds in straight lines. It twists, detours and doubles back, leaving us wondering whether we've lost time along the way. This week's parsha opens with a list: forty-two stops, forty years, for a journey Rashi says should have taken eleven days. Rashi also brings a midrash: God re...

After countless hours of searching, I thought the picture was complete. We had found the heart of Avot - the Torah of who you become, the third pillar of Jewish life - and mapped it across the whole tractate. Everything felt like it made sense. Then I noticed something I couldn't explain. Woven in among all the mishnayos about character and Torah learning, are mishnayos about action. About mitzvah...

The theory was beautiful. The Maharal, the Vilna Gaon, the Rambam, all pointing to the same conclusion: that Pirkei Avot is the third pillar of Torah, the book of who you become. But where was that picture actually visible in the text? In Part 3 of his series, the Chief opens his notebook, and lays out all 126 mishnayos of Avot. He counts. He categorises. And slowly, what had been there all along...

This episode is the next stage of my personal journey to discover the soul of Pirkei Avot. It is a search for what lies at the heart of the human being, and what Pirkei Avot empowers us to become. In the previous episode, I shared a discovery that had taken me years to reach. I thought I had finally discovered the central idea of Pirkei Avot. I assumed, at that point, that the journey was almost o...

I spent years learning it, teaching it, writing about it. Then one day I stopped and realised I had never asked what Pirkei Avot actually is.  What I found changed how I understand almost everything else. Many of us grew up with Pirkei Avot. Its teachings feel like something we have always known. If not now, when? Acquire yourself a friend. The world stands on three things. There is a warmth and f...

We are always looking for something new. A new place to go, a view we haven't seen, a fresh experience to inspire the spirit. There is a deep restlessness in being human, and no superficial experience  ever quite settles it. In this week's talk for Shavuot - the festival whose name means weeks, the festival of the journey - the Chief Rabbi opens with this restlessness, and what it tells us about w...

We all reach for structure. Routines, habits, the small repetitions that hold a day together. Without them, life can feel like chaos. In this week's talk on the Parsha of Bamidbar, the Torah describes the Israelite camp arranged with extraordinary order around the Mishkan, every tribe in its place. The Chief Rabbi argues that structure is not just helpful. It is one of the deepest psychological an...

Something astounding has just happened in America. In an official presidential proclamation marking the 250th anniversary of the United States, the President has called on Jewish Americans to observe a national Shabbat — from sunset Friday 15 May to nightfall Saturday 16 May. In over 3,300 years of Jewish history, no head of state has ever officially recognised Shabbat in this way and called on Je...

We live in an age of headlines. One event follows another so quickly. Wars and crises. History can begin to feel fragmented and almost impossible to understand. But the Torah asks us to step back and see something larger. In this week's talk on the Parsha of Behar-Bechukotai, the Torah confronts us with one of the most difficult questions in Jewish thought: how do we understand suffering, history,...