From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life

How are we to understand the many stories we have all read about anger run amok in public places; about bad behavior on airplanes, at restaurants, at the bridges that connect Canada and the US blocked by angry Canadian truck drivers? This anger victimizes innocent people, the passengers and flight attendants on the plane, the waiters and fellow diners at the restaurant, drivers trying to cross the...

February 19, 2022

Last shabbos, we gathered in the sanctuary to process the rising threat of antisemitism in our world. Officially, we were talking about the recently released report by Amnesty International which condemned Israel in very intense ways. In clearly antisemitic ways.  But we were also thinking about Colleyville, about swastikas carved into gym mats and painted on bathroom stalls here in Newton pu...

February 12, 2022

February 5, 2022

Robert Leikind, the Regional Director of AJC New England, brought us a special sermon on a recent Amnesty International report and and shared what we, individually, and we as a community, can do to support our beloved Eretz Yisrael.

January 29, 2022

January 29, 2022

How do you process a world in which doing the right thing, the kind thing, opening your doors and offering warmth and tea to someone in need, could result in someone holding a gun to your head and taking you hostage? How do you process a world in which synagogues around the country go through security trainings about evading shooters and deescalating terrorist attacks as a matter of course? A worl...

January 22, 2022

Last Saturday night Shira and I had friends over for dinner, a lovely couple we had come to know after Shira  had met the wife on a CJP mission to Israel.  They walked through our front door bearing gifts. A lovely bouquet of flowers. Very nice. And then something else. Something we had never before received from any guest ever.  The husband walked into our living room and presented...

January 15, 2022

For the last thirty-one years, until last year,  January 6 had been tied for the very best day in our family’s calendar. Thirty-one years ago our son Sam was born on January 6. In addition, the birthday of our beloved colleague Joan Mael is also January 6. For years, before the pandemic, our colleagues would take Joan out to Legal’s for lunch. At home and at work, I just loved January 6. And...

January 8, 2022

In 1949, David Schacker’s life was radically transformed.  Up until that point, he had been a healthy, bright-eyed, 10-year-old boy who loved running and playing tennis.  He had the kind of raw talent that promised opportunity.  Everyone knew he would get an athletic scholarship somewhere fabulous and looked forward to watching him succeed. But that dream was not to be. At ten, Scha...

Please enjoy this Shabbat Sermon with our wonderful Rabbi Michelle Robinson!

Adam Grant, the teacher of organizational psychology at Penn, a noted Ted Talk speaker, and the author of best-selling books, was recently on NPR sharing two very different takes on the phenomenon of being wrong. The first take concerned Adam himself when he was a teen-ager. He and a friend disagreed about a particular song in a Broadway musical. Each thought he was right. Eventually his friend su...

Join Cantor Elias Rosemberg and Josh Jacobson as they discuss what you can expect at this year's Hanukkah Happens concert on Thursday, December 23rd, 2021.

The classic comedy “Miss Congeniality” has a montage of beauty pageant contestants, one after the other, answering the question, “What is the one most important thing our society needs?” They all give the same answer: “World peace.”  It is a long-running joke – that the notion young beauty queens can have anything to do with resolving long-standing geopolitical tensions is naïve, even slightl...

December 11, 2021

December 4, 2021

At the beginning of Thanksgiving, my dad and I spent hours combing through genealogical records, trying to find his grandmother.  During the pandemic, I read Dani Shapiro’s book The Inheritance and had opened a subscription on MyHeritage.com trying to uncover my own family history. My dad remembered that he called his dad’s parents Grandpa Loui and Grandma Becky. But he didn’t remember his gr...

November 27, 2021

It was only 17 years ago, but it feels like forever ago.  It feels like it was a different century when, in 2004, David Brooks wrote a book about America called On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense.   His main point was that Americans lived in the future tense, by which he meant that whatever problems we faced in the present moment were not really prob...

November 20, 2021