From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life

Two years and three months later, we now know two things. Covid is not going away any time soon. There will be new variants and new cases. And we have to get back to life. There is a short and haunting passage from the tractate Berakhot 3A that connects deeply with our reality. Rabbi Yose (from the Maxwell House Haggadah) is in Jerusalem, after the Temple was destroyed. God’s house is ruined. The...

Last Shabbat an event of great importance happened: the Kentucky Derby and the unexpected, unlikely, implausible victory of a horse named Rich Strike. It is a double miracle underdog story. As of the day before the big race, Rich Strike was not even supposed to be racing. At the last minute, because another horse that had been scheduled to race was a last-minute scratch, Rich Strike was the last h...

The conversation about abortion in this country is strident and polarized. You are either pro-life or pro-choice. Every voice is passionate and convicted. There is no space for nuance. That is why, when the Rabbinical Assembly (RA), the union of Conservative movement rabbis, published their statement in the wake of the Supreme Court leak, they were unanimous and unequivocally pro-ch...

These remarks were delivered on May 7, 2022 by Rabbi Marc Baker, President and CEO of CJP, Combined Jewish Philanthropies. You can find more information about Marc here .

In general, we like to say that we don’t do politics at shul. We teach Torah. We try to teach and to live Jewish values. There are other places where divisive politics can be discussed and debated. Let the shul be a political-free zone.     Does that paradigm apply now? After all, immediately after news of the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion came out, the Rabbinical Assembly (RA)...

For the last 45 years or so, our shul has been distributing candles that we light at night to usher in Yom HaShoah. Each candle carries the name of one person, one out of the Six Million. As I shared at this year’s Yom HaShoah program, our members Barbara and Steve Grossman showed me their folder that has the names of the individuals that they thought about as they lit the candles every Yom HaShoa...

Caron Tabb has, at last, solved a puzzle that I could not solve for the last 25 years: how to get an entire class of 5th graders totally immersed, totally focused, totally engaged, for a good long time on Jewish ideas and what they mean to our lives. When our 5th graders walked into shul today, they were immediately drawn to Caron’s different exhibits which are now installed in the Leventhal-...

There is a famous vignette in the Talmud that resonates mightily for our time. It concerns a traffic jam. One morning a bride and her retinue go off to her wedding. A happy procession. There is singing and joy in the air. It is palpable. The bride is so happy. She can just imagine the rest of her life, building a life with the love of her life, the good times they will have, the family they will b...

The prophet Elijah, whom we last encountered at our seders, poses a conundrum. Elijah has this favored slot in Jewish history: the harbinger of hope and redemption. At the seder, we sing Eliyahu ha’navi as we move along the trajectory from darkness to light. At your son or grandson’s brit milah, the chair of Elijah invites the prophet into our lives at our choicest family moments. We bring El...

April 22, 2022

Now that we have finished both seders this year, I have a question: What is the relationship, if any, between the words we say at the seder, the deeds we do at the seder, or that we commit to do, and the world we live in? Does our living a Jewish life, the prayer, the rituals, the community building, in what way, if at all, does that Jewish living affect the world? Will the two seders we just had...

April 16, 2022

April 9, 2022

"Something like a plague has appeared upon my house." Leviticus 14:35. With these words, the troubled homeowner in ancient Israel gives voice to a truth that is universal. Homes, like human beings, are living things. Organic. Alive. Just like a human being can have healthy or not healthy practices, so too a home, and our home life, can have healthy or not healthy practices. Just like a h...

It was the slap, and the rant, heard around the world. How many of you saw Will Smith strike Chris Rock, and then rant about it,  in real time? How many of you read about it, or saw a clip of it, after the Academy Awards? It was of course raw and shocking, unscripted drama that was by far the most dramatic thing that happened all evening. If it were just a celebrity thing, a famous actor slap...

Last Shabbat had a special name, Shabbat Parah, the Sabbath of the Cow. It is one of the special Shabbatot that tells us that Passover is coming. What does the Red Heifer of Numbers 19 have to do with Passover? This text is famously opaque. A red heifer, hyssop, scarlet, and cedar are burned up, their ashes mixed with pure water, and that solution has the power to purify somebody who has...

In 1986, Professor Ray Scheindlin of the Jewish Theological Seminary authored a book with an evocative title: Wine, Women, & Death: Medieval Hebrew Poems on the Good Life.   The book featured the poetry of Jewish poets who lived during the Golden Age of Jewish Spain.  They lived the good life, with rich homes with gardens and pools and fountains. They wrote poetry about their good li...

There is a rare cantillation mark called the shalshelet that occurs only four times in the entire Torah. The shalshelet goes up and down and is conspicuously drawn out, to evoke a deep hesitation. In Genesis 19:16, Lot hesitates before leaving Sodom with his family. He knows it is marked for destruction, but he is stuck. More than we know what we like, we like what we know. Sod...

Leadership under fire. President Volodymyr Zelensky and Regional Governor Vitaliy Kim are both inspiring the world with their peerless leadership under the fire of this war. The Times article about the death and dying in the port city of Mykolaiv, shelled every day by Russian forces, provides the context for Governor Kim’s nightly inspiring addresses. President Zelensky this week talked from the h...

The eyes of the world are on Ukraine. Day after day for two weeks now and counting. How can the relentless shelling of civilian targets continue day after day, captured on all our screens in real time, and it keeps happening? What can the United States do about it?  What should the the United States do about it? Will the extreme sanction regime work? How does it end? ...

This week, in honor of International Women's Day and the upcoming holiday of Purim, we will learn the stories of three women: Vashti, who encountered drunken debauchery, sexism, and injustice and responded with clarity and conviction. When King Achashverosh demanded that she dance naked in front of his friends, she sent back a one-word answer: no. That response resulted in her death and did not ch...

Is Ukraine on its own? Or is the world with Ukraine? It is so confusing. The answer seems to be yes.  On the one hand, the world is with Ukraine. The Daily on March 2 told the fascinating story of how it came to be that the European Union passed unanimously the strongest, toughest, most stringent sanctions ever, including sanctions directed personally against Putin and his henchmen. The natio...

Ever since the war started in Ukraine, I’ve been feeling things that don’t make sense. The space over my heart feels achy, almost bruised. My breathing is shallow, like the air around me is thick with worry and the oxygen can’t get through. My heart races and then goes quiet and then races again.  I’m desperate for information, doom-scrolling at all hours, reading every newspaper article I ca...

Barbara Gaffin and Betsy Hecker spoke to our congregation about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Both have worked on the partnership between the Boston Jewish community, Combined Jewish Philanthropies, and the Ukrainian Jewish community for many years. They addressed the question on all of our minds: what can I do? How can I help? We are praying for peace every morning and every evening. May our pray...

February 26, 2022