From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life

The Talmud has a famous story from  Menachot 29B  that invites us to confront three hard truths that we would rather not think about. Our mortality. The limited reach of our legacy. And the unredeemed nature of our world—we will live, and we will pass, with the world’s big problems unsolved.   Why this story now? It is Erev Shavuot, the eve of our receiving the Torah. This story is about the natur...

Following the March of the Living trip, Cantor Rosemberg remained in Israel to volunteer and perform with 25 Latin American cantors. Listen to learn about Cantor Rosemberg's incredibly meaningful and moving experience!

Standards. Is there an elegant theory for when to enforce them and when to choose not to enforce them?   Parents face this question all the time. We have standards in our home! But our children do their own thing that flies in the face of our standards. Do we enforce the standard, or let it go?   Synagogues face this question all the time. To celebrate a Bar/Bat Mitzvah in our community, a family...

Fifty-three years ago, on March 31, 1972, the Soviet Union launched a spacecraft that was supposed to go to Venus. But it never made it to Venus. Some malfunction in the rocket prevented it from leaving the earth’s orbit. The Soviets named this spacecraft Cosmos 482—which became code in Soviet lexicon for epic failure. For 53 years, the spacecraft that could never make it to Venus circled the eart...

Lov ing critics .  The phrase feels like an oxymoron. In fact it is a willed double entendre.   Perhaps it means that critics are loving. Their words of critique flow from a place of love. In fact, they feel that suppressing their critique, going along to get along, would undermine that which they love.   Perhaps loving critics means that people who are not critics should nonetheless love and appr...

Adina Vogel Ayalon – an Israeli citizen who has lived and raised a family in Israel and worked for decades toward building peaceful relations between Israelis and Palestinians – and Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz are uniquely positioned to unpack some of the difficult questions facing our communities today, including: How can American Jews most effectively advocate to bring about the return of the hostage...

May 10, 2025

Last week we encountered one kind of “imperfect peace,” to use the term coined by our teacher, Sara Labaton of Hartman: shalom bayit, domestic harmony, made possible by a lack of transparency in a marriage. We read the ruling of Ovadia Yosef that a wife not disclose the fact of her abortion before she had met her husband so that their marriage could continue. This week we encounter another complic...

A woman in Israel approached her rabbi with the following dilemma. When she was a younger woman, she was not religious. She had relations with a man and got pregnant. She had an abortion. She then became religious. She did teshuvah , repentance. She committed herself to learning Torah, doing mitzvot and joining an observant community. She moved to a new town, where she was not known, met a young y...

Sara Labaton, the Director of Teaching and Learning at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, recently taught a group of local rabbis. She observed that the prophetic ideals of peace (lion lies down the with lamb, nations will beat swords into ploughshares, neither will they know war anymore) are so lofty as to be unattainable . Would we be better off looking towards rabbinic ideals of pea...

God is always confusing. We never know what to think. But that is especially true now in this fraught theological season between commemorating the Shoah (April 24), honoring soldiers who fell in Israel’s wars and victims of terrorism on Yom Hazikaron (April 30), and celebrating the birth of the State of Israel on om Ha’atzmaut (May 1).   Tomorrow we are going to study a modern Jewish philosopher t...

Led by Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz

What happens when we lose our loved ones before we lose them? This happens to so many of our families. Our loved one experiences a slow decline, cognitively, or physically, that takes place over years that feels like forever. The decline crowds out earlier chapters. Our mother has not been herself for so long I can’t even remember what she used to be like. It’s been so long since my father was who...

In 1987 Oprah Winfrey read a book that changed her life. What happened to her as a result of reading that book, the unanticipated lesson she learned, remains fresh and urgent for her 38 years later. The book, by author Toni Morrison, was a novel called Beloved in which Morrison attempts to show what it was like to be a slave. What did slavery do to the enslaved person’s inner life, to their psyche...

Powerful leaders who lie are as old as the Bible. Our Haftarah tomorrow, King David’s  song of gratitude  to God (2 Samuel 22:1-51), contains a big fat lie—a lie so obvious, so brazen, that one wonders how he had the temerity to utter it. King David says of himself: The Lord rewarded me according to my merit, He requited the cleanness of my hands. For I have kept the ways of the Lord And have not...

How is this Passover different from all other Passovers? How is the seder we are doing tonight different from all the other seders we have ever done? Let me share a recent conversation I had with a good friend. We have a beloved member of our shul whose mother was born in Londorf, Germany. She was taken with all the other Jews of Londorf to Auschwitz. She was the only survivor from her town. Every...

In 1992 Rabbi Joseph Telushkin published a book entitled Jewish Humor: What the Best Jewish Jokes Say About Jews . While he dedicated the book to his three daughters, the first chapter is about how hard it is for generations in a Jewish family to understand one another; how easy it is for frictions and misunderstandings to grow. Chapter one is entitled “Oedipus, Shmedipus, as Long as He Loves His...

Can one person change the world? That is the question at the end of the tractate Sanhedrin. The word "Sanhedrin" means the supreme judicial, civic, legal, religious authority in ancient Israel. The Talmudic tractate Sanhedrin is about justice-the human beings, institutions, procedures and protocols, evidentiary rules, safeguards, that enable human beings to create and sustain a just soci...

This week, I was speaking with a member who has been struggling with an intense family situation and was heading into a tense and painful meeting. She was riding in a Lyft. The driver was playing Christian radio quietly in the front. A few minutes before they arrived at their destination, she heard something on the radio that piqued her interest. "Can you turn that up?" she asked. The ho...

Shall we invite the troubling headlines—from Israel, Gaza, America, our world—to our seders? Are our seders supposed to be a joyful way to avoid the world (family, friends, songs, children’s skits, plays, games, great food, lots of wine, tasty desserts), or an invitation to engage the world and think out loud together about how we can make it better? Are there any great options? Three options pres...

In the Torah God tells us that from time to time God will hide God’s face. This would seem to be such a time. How do we find God in our troubled world together?

A woman named Jessica Sklar, her husband and their two children were happily living their lives in Pacific Palisades when their house burned down. Since losing all their earthly possessions, they have been wandering in the wilderness. In less than two months, this family has moved five times, from A B & B X5. In the home they used to love, they had stability and serenity. In the wilderness the...

How are we to understand the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil and the stated intent of the federal government to deport him? It is good. He is an Israel hater. Finally the federal government is cracking down on Israel hate and Jew hate that have been running rampant on college campuses, leading to the intimidation and harassment of Jewish students and supporters of Israel. Columbia has been the capital of...

Robert Housman established Yad Chessed so he could help his neighbors struggling in Boston’s Jewish community. In the early years, he ran it by himself, with help from his wife Sue, as he worked full-time as a computer programmer. He directed Yad Chessed until the summer of 2012 when he became a member of its Board of Directors.

On Yom Kippur, October 9, 1943, in the middle of the Holocaust, Rabbi Walter Wurzburger gave a sermon at Congregation Chai Odom in Brighton, Massachusetts entitled “ The Individual in the Crisis .” He argued that Jews in Greater Boston own moral responsibility for the Holocaust. On the basis of the High Priest’s avodah service, Rabbi Wurzburger offered this stark challenge: We behold a world of ag...