From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life

This week I found myself watching, and rewatching obsessively, 1 minute and 11 seconds of sheer human desperation, a video link on my iPad, of chaos and confusion  at the Kabul Hamid Karzai International Airport.  Throngs of Afghan citizens were so desperate to flee from the Taliban that they ran onto the tarmac and literally clung to the outside of an American military plane as it was m...

“You’re gonna drown like that.” I was standing on my tip toes, trying to hold a tarp above our tent while Solomon adjusted the rope tying it to the tree above.  We were racing to get our camp set up before the rain.

Join our wonderful Rabbi Michelle Robinson on August 7, 2021.

Sermon from July 24, 2021

It was 8 PM in late August of 2000.  The subway car screeched into the 14th Street Station in Chelsea; Danny stood near the door with impatience.  He was running late for dinner with his partner, Pete. It had been a big year for them.  After nearly three years of dating, they had decided to move in together.  It seemed like he had finally found his happily ever after.  He...

This year, everyone is talking about Naomi Osaka. At 23, Naomi Osaka is one of the best tennis players in the world. Literally.  She is a four-time Grand Slam champion and the first Asian player to be ranked number one in the world by the Women’s Tennis Association. In May of this year, Naomi made the bold decision to skip a press conference for which she accepted a $15,000 fine, and then to...

What do we do about what happened to Rabbi Shlomo Noginski on Thursday afternoon? What do we do when a man, a husband, a father of ten, an idealist, a rabbi, a teacher, who leaves his home in Israel and comes to our home, Greater Boston, where we live, where we try to have a rich and safe Jewish community, he comes here to be a sheliach , an emissary, at the Shaloh House, a teacher of Torah especi...

A few weeks ago I was in Los Angeles on a family reconnection tour seeing relatives I had not seen during the pandemic.  I was speaking with my niece Megan and her husband Randy, and they shared an improbable story about a dog. Randy and Megan and their children had loved their dog, a miniature schnauzer, named Kelsie, that was a part of their family for 15 years.  That is a long life in...

This week, I was speaking with one of our graduating seniors and he shared a story with me that I just can’t stop thinking about. He was at a graduation party. During the festivities, he hears some kid opining about how Jews are the worst and Israel has no right to exist. His blood immediately boils, and he rushes to confront the offender. He asks the kid, “how can you say that? That’s so Anti-Sem...

Some 45 years ago, in 1976, I saw an episode of a sitcom that I still remember today.  It was an episode in the seventh and final season of The Mary Tyler Moore Show entitled “Ted’s Change of Heart.”  Ted Baxter, the pompous news anchor played by Ted Knight, has a mild heart attack in the middle of delivering the evening news.  After a brief stay in the hospital, he is restored to f...

6/12/21

Enjoy our wonderful Rabbi Michelle Robinson's sermon from June 5, 2021

Broadcasted on June 5, 2021.

I want to tell you an odd story, not well known. I’ll call it the case of the missing mitzvah. The Hebrew Bible relates two cases when important mitzvot were lost to the Jewish people. Jews just stopped doing them, in one case for 40 years, in the other case for hundreds of years.

We have all been thinking a lot about Israel the last two weeks.  I want to talk to you this morning about an Israel story, and a human story, that you won’t find in the papers.  It is about a kiss. It is a kiss that many of us will give, and many of us will receive, in our lives.  It is a kiss that we about this past Tuesday, on Shavuot, in the Book of Ruth.

From May 22, 2021

Join our wonderful Rabbi Michelle Robinson on May 15, 2021.

From May 15th, 2021.

From May 8th, 2021

Madeline always loved to sing.  As a teenager, she had a gorgeous voice, a two-and-a-half octave range, and the kind of creative artistry that made people swoon.  She and her friends would sing along to Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and Judy Garland, and she took the stage at every wedding and bar mitzvah she could.  In high school, won an adult talent contest at the Adams Theater...

From May 1, 2021

We’ve known this for a while, but suddenly the realization that you only live once has taken on a fierce urgency.  The acronym YOLO, you only live once, was popularized by the rapper Drake in 2013, but as we are emerging from the pandemic YOLO has a new energy as a call to action.  Last week New York Times writer Kevin Roose authored a piece entitled “Welcome to the YOLO economy” about h...

From April 24th, 2021.

I want to tell you a story about a magic spoon.  The story comes from a different time and place, the 1870s in a town in Romania called Stefanesti, where there was an illustrious Hasidic dynasty.  The most famous of these Hasidic masters was Rabbi Avrohom Mattisyou Friedman, who became the Second Shtefaneshter Rebbe in 1869 and continued for 64 years.  He was considered a hidden tza...

From April 17th, 2021.