Found In Translation: Weekly Divrei Torah and Sermons from the BJ Rabbis and Guest Teachers

Shabbat Nahamu is known as the Shabbat of Comfort. But this year, many of us arrived feeling anything but comforted. During Kabbalat Shabbat on Friday, Rabbi Felicia Sol shared a kavannah addressing the recent stabbings on the Upper West Side, for which the alleged attacker has since been charged with a hate crime and attempted murder, as well as Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s recent video about Israeli P...

The stories we tell about our past shape the future we’re able to build. In his d’var Torah on Shabbat Devarim, Rabbi Alex Braver explores the idea of creating "a usable past"—finding meaning in our experiences, even before history has settled, so that we can move forward with purpose.

In his d'var Torah on Parashat Mattot-Mas'ei, Joe Blumberg explores what Moses' final act can teach us about building a more just world—even when we know we won't see its completion.

On Pride Shabbat, Rabbi Shirley Idelson wove together Miriam's story, Jewish tradition, and her own experience to explore belonging, resilience, and how loss can open the way to new possibilities for ourselves and our communities.

In his final Shabbat kavannah as Rosh Kehillah, Rabbi Roly reflected on the mysterious ritual of the red heifer and what it teaches about humility, belonging, and resisting the urge to divide the world into insiders and outsiders.

In this week’s D’var Torah, Rabbi Becca Weintraub explores the tension between envy and gratitude at the heart of Parashat Korah. Through the examples of Korah, Moshe, and Aaron, she asks what it would mean to live as though we truly had enough—and to find joy not only in our own blessings, but in the blessings of others.

Rabbi Felicia Sol explores how the trauma of October 7 has challenged our capacity to tolerate disagreement. Jewish tradition, she argues, calls us not to certainty, but to the sacred work of engaging with difference.

In a world obsessed with productivity and optimization, Senior Rabbinic Fellow Joe Blumberg reminds us that our deepest purpose is something far more human: to help blessing flow freely from one person to another.

Rabbi Roly Matalon asks: what must die in the wilderness before something new can emerge? Drawing on the painful wandering of Bemidbar, he reflects on what it means to hold onto moral seriousness when everything around us is eroding, and why Torah is given not in moments of clarity, but precisely here, in the chaos of now.

The Torah isn't given only once. Each year, a new unfolding arrives, one that speaks to this particular moment in history, and to each of us at our particular moment in our lives. But to receive it, we have to be standing in our own place. As Shavuot approaches, Rabbi Roly Matalon draws on a Hasidic teaching to ask: what does it mean to inhabit your own truth so that when the Torah is given again,...

Senior Rabbinic Fellow Joe Blumberg reflects on the Torah’s radical vision of the Jubilee year: a system that resets the economy every fifty years. More than freeing the enslaved and forgiving debts, the Jubilee year is a powerful reminder that in a world driven by achievement and accumulation, we are ultimately caretakers, not owners.

BJ Rabbinic Fellow Iliana Brodsky takes a troubling passage from Leviticus and turns it into something beautiful — a reflection on what allows us to truly trust and connect with one another, even across every difference.