Judaism for the Thinking Person

I've always wondered why we repeatedly pray to God to be willing to grant us Shabbat, etc. What does it mean to be willing, or to be capable of exercising one's will? Free will and the exercise of will always comes up when trying to understand Pharoah's will and heart-hardening in Shemot, and so I use sources there to answer the question. The conclusion touches on how our relationship to God is different from our relationship to Torah. God, like Moshe, may not always be speaking or willing, but the Torah always is.

There are virtually no references to grandparenting in the Torah, until, by sharp contrast, we are told in Genesis 50:23 that Joseph got not only to grandparent but great-grandparent as well. I reflect upon this startling exception using two articles from the New York Times, including a recent one that describes the recent increase of adult children in their 20's becoming roommates with their grandparents.

Using the interpretations of the Rabbis (including Nachmanides and Sefer HaYashar) to understand Joseph's assimilation (in name, dress, etc.), I compare him to the American hero very recently in the news!

Yaakov's famous wrestling scene and renaming as Yisrael --one who wrestles with God and prevails-- is often understood as Yisrael wrestling with God as his opponent. The Rabbis point out how problematic this is, since the opponent is listed as a "man," not as God. Therefore some of the Rabbis see it this way: the wrestling opponent looks identical to Esav, being his guardian angel (Rashi) or his projection, and wrestling "with God" (im elohim) means wrestling with God as a supportive ally. Yaakov clearly is the Patriarch of Anxiety, and in this climax, we see a powerful message: one does not vanquish anxiety, but rather "one who prevails" is one who does what they love (say, acting, healing, teaching, parenting, etc.) while experiencing panic and anxiety at the same time. This is the powerful message which is both true according to science and according to Torah.

Is it right to use arable land --often very expensive in populated areas -- for graves, then pollute the environment by keeping them "dignified" through maintenance and pesticides, with the hollow promise of "perpetual care," and say this is all required by Jewish Law, when Jewish Law itself is the source of the requirement for eco-decomposition and of prohibitions against costly burial? I explicate the sources using the Conservative Movement's oficial responsum, "Alternative Kevura Methods" by Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky, which can be found at bit.ly/3tMa4RG

In this ten minute teaching I used to begin the 10 Days of Awe, I connect several teachings. The first is the Rabbinic teaching that following a calamity upon a village, one should try to give the luxury rations to those who are used to luxury because being unaccostomed to hardship, their anguish might be even greater than others' though we are tempted to believe the opposite. The second is that during Yom Kippur, we approach ourselves and our relationships in a state of aninut, of affliction -- the same word used when one has suffered calamity, and the same word used when one is burying a loved one and then heading into the week of shivah grieving. The third is that it is forbidden to say, "How are you?" to someone who has just experienced aninut, and instead one must practice a special form of active listening. Following two years of calamitous pandemic, where many of us put on brave faces because we are scared to share our emotions due to our perceived privilege or we may not have suffered as much as others, we must acknowledge that our pain is nonetheless real, very real, and that the directives of actively telling our stories and actively listening are the imperative way forward.

Is the Jewish concept of history that of linear progress, or that of Ecclesiastes' cyclical vanity? This teaching was delivered during a 12-Step friendly Serenity Shabbat.

The theology of the haftarot of the exile prophets like Deutero-Isaiah is hard for most people to relate to: "You are in exile, your life is full of tragedy, and I love you, I remember you as you were before, but I won't be getting you out of the situation you got yourself in, and which I warned you repeatedly about." This is the kind of "unloving" God that Christian theologians for millenia have accused Jews of having. Yet do those in Al-Anon understand it in a way they can teach us?

For too long, Jews have associated the Recovery movement with Christianity, and we have seen those in recovery, or with addictions, as outsiders to Torah. This is far from reality. The main example of vows-of-change --the essence of High Holidays-- in the Torah itself is the vow to abstain from alcohol and other intoxicants, involving emulating priestly service and separating for a period from one's family and social triggers. The very process of High Holiday teshuvah is recognizing our wrong behavior, feeling bad about it, and then releasing that guilt feeling through doing a cheshbon nefesh --an accounting-- of exactly how we have harmed others and ourselves, then making amends, then embracing a different path, and then serving God and others. This is the teaching of 12 step. (Jewishly, the teshuvah steps are enumerated sometimes as 4, sometimes as 6, and sometimes as more steps, but they essentially mirror the 12 steps of recovery.) Whether the 12 Step Movement has roots in Christian founders is irrelevant: it embodies the sacred teachings of High Holidays. This sermon is dedicated to the memory of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel Twerski z"l, who died in 2021 from complications from COVID.

My Yom Kippur sermon in 2022. Using Ethan Kross's book Chatter along with Jewish sources and my own observations about life, I challenge us to form our relationship to God through our relationship with our inner voice, which these days tends to be taken over by CHATTER, the stress brought on by the takeover of our inner God voice through the Satan voice. It's time we challenge it head on.

I share Ilana Kurshan's teaching on rabbinic midrash seeing Moses as a mother in transition, as they question whether, at the promised land border, God's refusing his entry is frustrating his desire to mother the people more, or frustrating his desire to claim "his turn" to actually have a life now that the children are leaving the nest. I include my own glosses, but make no mistake that this is Ilana Kurshan's teaching.

In this d'var Torah, I discuss how parashat Eikev is the section of Torah most frought with ambivalences, from the text itself through the Rabbinic commentaries: blessing as bounty and overextension, independence and dependence, hardship and privilege, closeness and distance. I relate this to our lives directly in the examples of the college experience and of our relationship with God.

How do we relate to the Torah's insistence that the kohanim who do the major rituals be without blemish or disability? Isn't that grossly ableist? I suggest the following. First, the Torah is not an idealistic description of a utopia of saints -- it forces us to recognize truths about human nature, and then create a society for real people like us, so it forces us to recognize our own prejudices and ableism, which are also active today. Second, there is a serious issue at stake involving the Offerings of Damaged Goods, which is a massive problem in our society today --which tells us a lot about ourselves and how we give. And third, I use the commentator Bartenura's commentary to offer a way the tradition is accepting human nature but leading us to how to refine it into inclusivity.

In this presentation, I present the Talmudic sources on Judaism's discussion of the status of the fetus, and I argue that what's been missing from the discussion --including the discussion of Jewish views -- is the fact that Judaism leaves open what the status of the fetus is between 40 days and full viability, but importantly assigns the process to the mother. Men have no say in it. In other words, the issue is not freedom of religion in the sense of one denomination versus another, but rather the freedom of the prospective mother to have her own relationship with God, as considers that in-between state of the fetus she carries, and what it means to her and to God as she makes her decision, and not let others tell her what it is or not. (One issue I wish I had made a bit clearer: around the 11 minute mark, I talk about the fact that Tractate Niddah specifies that between 40 and 80 days, the miscarriage is more than a normal period, and there is an ontological leap again starting at 80 days. The specifics here are that the woman at these two sections remains in a state of ritual impurity following the miscarriage, as she would for giving birth, because after 80 days there is even clear evidence of sexual organs. In other words, the Talmud is acknowledging that the embryo is developing into a fetus, and while a fetus is not a baby, it is still not a "nothing." In addition, many consider this stigmazing the woman to say she is in "ritual impurity," but recall the ritual impurity functioned as "maternity leave" and thus the Talmud is giving the woman maternity leave to recover from the miscarriage, it's not stigmatizing her.)

One of my "standing on one foot while answering a humungous theological question" podcasts. "Rabbi, what do we mean by miracles? What is up with the Red Sea splitting?" I give my on-one-foot 5 minute answer, but we should all go and study (as Hillel famously said after answering his on-one-foot answer) afterward. By the way, I refer to seeing a red butterfly in the answer: at a funeral and shivah I officiated at, it came up repeatedly that a butterfly would show up in their lives just at the time of remembering the widow's husband, who had a very special connection to butterflies.

At the same time as the Torah turns its pages to describe the creation and pattern of the Temple, with men, women, and children mixed together, and the haftarah describes the construction of the Temple in Jerusalem as the same, the Israeli government reneges on the Kotel Agreement to provide a separate space for mixed gender worship near the Wailing Wall, even while turning over the Wall officially to ultra extremist fundamentalist Jews who claim that the inclusion of women --or women leading prayer in the women's section-- is a fundamental affront to the original pattern (which is a lie). In this presentation, I quote extensively from three sources: the Haaretz article from 2020 called "What Yuval Noah Harari Thinks About Women’s Fight for Equal Rights at the Western Wall," David Golinkin's 2011 article "Is the Entire Kotel Plaza Really a Synagogue?" and Rabbinical Assembly's 2022 "Statement on Non-Implementation of Kotel Agreement."

While Judaism demands that one does not judge oneself too harshly, nor live in a place of self-defeating criticism, nevertheless there's a vital role for self-judgment to play in our learning from the past to walk with God and expand our ability to channel holiness into the world. In fact, since God loves us as we are, and even provides a Shabbat that makes us feel that the world is made for us as we are, it is vital we judge ourselves, because that's not the job God wants, nor is it the job for others to do.

The Talmud tells us that the first great act of God's love (chesed, lovingkindness) was making clothing for Adam and his wife. Do we return the favor?

Joseph's dreams seem to predict the future and his role in it. So does God have a plan for us?

The source sheet I'm reading from is at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1R0Txiy6QvQiHo40hKSsHyafLernFjS8tXp0tJo7gPWA/edit?usp=sharing This is a lecture to give the listener the Rabbinic sources that create distinctions and legal status for decisions around the criminalization of elective abortion, as discussed in the Supreme Court hearings.

Here I tease out the following ideas of bell hooks: 1. Our society valuing power over others as the paramount value, and rooted in the psychology of men. 2. This value playing out in drama as "the protagonist" as the center around which others must revolve, and often the only one whose name counts. 3. Oppositional gaze: the one who owns their justice perspective is the one who has the power to gaze at injustice [like Moses having the privilege to "gaze" at the taskmaster beating a Hebrew slave]. 4. Intersectional identity: our society tries to have our identities of oppression divided up -- say, of black, immigrant, poor, and woman-- because that plays into the system rather than seeing them all at once, at the "intersectionality" of our identites. 5. Finding our voice as loving ourselves enough to feel that we are fully ready to put that full loved identify forward, rather than perpetuating the system by finding ourselves falling short. 6. When we love ourselves, we can love others --meaning holding their ability to change into their full self-love and changing selves-- rather than fall back into power contests. These are applied the first six chapters of Exodus as: 1) Pharoah's actions about power over men, so he declares genocide on male babies (since they are a threat to him); men beating each other and finding this normal, and even threatening Moses with turning him in to show their power over him since his superior power identity is what they see, not his trying to help them. 2) Who has a name besides Moses? Not Pharoah. Not the Pharoah's daughter. Not Moses' parents, nor his sister. Not the handmaidens. Chapter 3 is all about "What is God's name?" to teach us that rather than the protagonist structure (one is important not the others), we are all equal as characters in God's story, rather than ego driving our own story where others play their parts in relation to us. 3) Oppositional gaze: Moses first leaves the palace grounds as a bar-mitzvah age teen, and he GAZES at what is happening and sees injustice. He "looks this way and that" because, as the midrash tells us, he is wondering why others aren't gazing at the injustice as he is. 4) Intersectionality: Is Moses Hebrew or Egyptian? He's both, and splitting the two up allows others to deny his subjectivity and power. Are the midwives Hebrew or Egyptian? Is Pharaoh's daughter powerful (as nobility) or powerless (as a woman)? The parashah continually plays on these ambiguous and intersectional identities. 5) Finding one's voice: this is the parashah of Moshe claiming he is poor of speech so he cannot speak truth to power, and he overcomes it. 6) Are the signs, wonders, and plagues just another power contest --the value basis of patriarchal society-- or is God trying to give Pharaoh chances over and over again to change, the basis of love though one must leave the relationship if one is not being treated the same in exchange?

Robert Bly, one of America's great poets and poetry translators, recently died. In this presentation, I apply Bly's books of social commentary to the end of Genesis. Iron John described the effects of fathers turning over parenting duties to others --like the wrong-headed "kids learn from interacting with other kids" rather than with parents. It also argued for the simultaneous absence of initiative rites in American society. In The Sibling Society, Bly argued that American society represents an adolescent stage of development, not true adulthood. I apply both books to the entire end of the Book of Genesis.

These are my reflections upon Arnold Eisen's 2015 essay, "Joseph, Hanukkah, and the Dilemmas of Assimilation." Those who investigate the Hanukkah story quickly learn (simply by reading the Books of Maccabees in the apocrypha) that the events around the 186 BCE revolt of the Maccabees against the Hellenizing-Syrians do not involve a miracle of oil. Rather, following the decree by Antiochus IV that the Temple in Jerusalem be dedicated to Hellistic religion, the Maccabees first attack Hellenized Jews themselves, who show little to no resistance to the decree. (Josephus tells us, more or less, that the Greek sports stadium in Jerusalem was a far better draw to local Jews than the Temple.) The second part of the story involves the Maccabees attacking the Syrian-Greek forces themselves, and achieving victory. (Two hundred years later, living under the oppression of the Roman forces, and witnessing Roman massacres of Jews following rebellions, the Rabbis introduced the folktale of the oil to distract Jews from a story encouraging further rebellion against Hellenistic forces.) So, when we today read the original tale, it creates uncomfortable questions about assimilation. Aren't most American Jews going to sports games on Saturday rather than to temple? Aren't most American Jews unrecognizable from their peers, as Joseph was unrecognizable to his brothers? The simple narrative of assimilation states that American Jews were quick to assimilate for personal and social gain. In this presentation, I argue that this little-challenged narrative is oversimplified, wrong and damaging.

[WARNING: The second half of the podcast discusses the rape of Dinah and I share an account of sexual harrassment from recent congressional testimony.] If the early chapters of Genesis are about where we come from, the second half of Genesis is about the experiences that change us, that make us who we are as adults, not through our own achievements but through what happens to us, from tragedy to transcendence, from rejection to love, from struggles with mental health, sexual harrasment, being cheated, to seeing God in a place. Little do we notice how in these chapters the experiences are incommunicable: the experience is the words of Torah --as in our lives they are experiences of the ineffable depths in which we are changed, in which we receive a new name-- but the figures don't speak of them to others, and certainly don't record their experiences in the self confessional blogs and interviews that dominate our media world today. And nowhere is this more poignant than the experience of sexual harrasment and rape, which I discuss using the reflections of Hadar's Rosh Yeshiva Aviva Richman.

In this sermon -- playing on the Rabbinic commentary that the name of the Torah portion that mentions Sarah's death is called "The Life [or Lives] of Sarah" because we should celebrate the lives she lead rather than think of her death-- I discuss Dara Horn's new book People Love Dead Jews, which argues that the non-Jewish world loves books about Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel because the stories of these dead Jews teaches us something universal and moralistic about ourselves, rather than challenging us to think of what Jewish lives are like, how they are different, how they might challenge us. How is it that Wiesel's Night went from its original form, a scathing accusation against the Euopean bystanders who let the Holocaust happen to a book about God's hiding? Because God's hiding happens in each of our lives, like a universalistic lesson about life's tragedies, and allows us to avoid the deep questions of Jewish difference and anti-Semitism. In this teaching, I also ask whether we Jews are guilty of this: inviting in our own Romantic visions of our ancestors --which allows us to live a two dimensional moralizing vision of them-- rather than embracing their difference, and practicing our own.

It hasn't been very long in human history (two or three generations) that we live our lives according to a clock rather than according to the processes of our lives (waking up, milking the cow, putting the hay in the barn, taking the goats for their grazing...). This has changed our relationship to God, to ourselves, and to each other. We judge ourselves by our productivity, how much we can get done using this resource of time, how much demand we can meet from others before our next appointments. We live outside of time, in a negative relationship, rather than in time, in a positive relationship. Using Oliver Burkeman's book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, I reflect on how the pandemic first connected us to a positive relationship with time, vis a vis the Sabbatical Year, but then jerked us back to the negative relationship, as demands for productivity --now virtually impossible and harder than before-- were placed on our backs. How can we live in time, not through the standard of productivity, but through the invitation of presence?

In this dvar Torah, I share Talmudic stories of rabbis trying to honor their mothers in ways that are both comical and also poignant in their alluding to our individual (and often lonely) struggles to honor God and them, especially as they age, with seemingly no yardstick to compare ourselves and manage expectations.

The last sections of the book of Numbers deal with the local tribes, themselves fighting and displacing each other, refusing to grant the Israelite refugees safe passage through their lands. As a consequence of this moral failing, they lose the right to keep the land --an important message of Torah. In fact, coupled with their denials of safe passage, they hire the famous Near-Eastern Bilaam to magically curse the Israelites with fraught words justifying violence against them. It's like this entire section was relived in the years approaching 1948, when local Arab populations opposed Jewish refugees buying land and living peacefully in British Mandate Palestine, and instead attacked them. Ever since they resort to Bilaam curses, the use of factually incorrect curse words of "Genocide," "Apartheid," "Settler Colonialism," "Ethnic Cleansing," "Daily Massacres of Children," and "Not Indigenous" to scapegoat Jews and justify violence against them, not just in Israel but in intimidation and harrassment on the campuses in the U.S. In this Yom Kippur morning sermon, I name this reenactment of the end of Numbers and propose that Jews respond not with compaints about anti-Semitism, but with a campaign of history, along with a renewed consciousness that is not a victim consciousness but is a creator consciousness that is inclusive of Arabs, so we don't lose our moral authority in the Land.

The creation stories of Genesis blend mythological motifs with reflections on the moral consequences of human evolution. When we understand the serpent voice to be the appearance of the human inner voice --the beginnings of evolutionary, human self-consciousness, a consequence of eating of the fruit of the garden-- then the hiding that Adam does, not because they have disobeyed God (as one presumes on a first read) but because for the first time they know they are naked, is crucial to notice. The possibilities of self-consciousness are immense --they include becoming like God by living in past, present, and future at once, they include radical intentionality and subjectivity-- but also include the dark side, a preoccupation with self-consciousness in its most mundane meaning, a preoccupation with wondering what people think of one, the feeling of being naked in front of others, the nightmare of showing up at school in one's underwear. What do people think of us? Do they like us? What about our physical appearance are they reacting to? How do they compare us to others, favorably or unfavorably? This is the serpent voice in our heads, of our inner "I," the one that nips at our heels and we try to clobber on the head but only goes away only temporarily but always returns. Research shows that this serpent voice is amplified to monstrous degrees by social media: Are my posts liked? Are others making fun of my appearance in the photo? Am I totally ignored? Am I left out? How can I cultivate a persona that garners "likes"? How can I grown that persona, maintain it, even as it detaches from any connection to my authentic self, so when God says, "Ayekah?" Where/who are you really? God knows the self I'm wearing is the product of the serpent voice, my cultivated and emotionally crushing phony self?

Synagogues like mine have resorted to making virtual community over much of the pandemic. How do we do a heshbon nefesh of the experience: a reckoning of the pluses and minuses as we enter a new future of self-creation? What is the halakhah of it, what have we learned, what are the issues? In this Kol Nidrei sermon, I address these issues, as we consider who we wish to be as we enter the future.

Our society is permeated with a victim mentality that presents itself as prophetic, but is punitive. Caught in the Victim Triangle, everyone must fit into a role of Victim, Persecutor, or Rescuer --both in individual dramas and in societal theory. Change presents itself only in the options of shifting roles in the triangle: persecutors must become victims, victims will fix things by teaching them (and society) a lesson, someone gets stuck in rescuer role. Is teshuvah, repentance, about being forced to experience the karma of society's ills, or is that a blame game? In this sermon, I present an alternative framework, rooted in systems psychology and in Torah: teshuvah is an act of Creation, and when one transcends the triangle, one reaches true authenticity in one's walking with others, walking with oneself, and walking with God.

How often do people say to me, "Rabbi, Rosh Hashanah is not about prayers, theology and sermons -- it's about getting together with family!" or "My grandfather was a model Jew because he was committed to his grandchildren" or "One does not know true awe until one has had children." And how often have I as a rabbi said similar things at a bat mitzvah or baby naming from the bimah, or when explaining a prayer like the one that says "You shall love God...through diligently teaching your children..." How does this feel to the unmarried, the willingly child-free, and those whose lives are not geared around children or grandchilden? How do we treat them in our community: as souls committed to covenant (perhaps more than those with children), or as incomplete human beings watching from the outside? Why aren't we talking more about Miriam, who has no husband or children in the Torah? Or about the Mother of Israel, the historical creator of the Israelite nation, the prophetess and leader Deborah? It's time we stop and realize that L'Dor Vador, from generation to generation, does not refer just to one's own children, but to the future of the Jewish people, something the childless and child-free often understand in a way that we can learn from them as our teachers.

In the parashah of "Shoftim" in Deuteronomy, we have the norms for shoftim v'shotrim, the judges and professional criminal justice system officials. We are commanded that tsedek tsedek tirdof, known as "justice, justice you shall pursue" though tsedek means "justice" in the sense of "righteousness," not in the sense of revenge. The parashah goes on to discuss capital crimes, an eye for an eye, and the death penalty. For many, they read it assuming that Judaism endorses the death penalty, with "eye for an eye" the "justice" principle underlying the norms. In this teaching, I show how "eye for an eye" and the death penalty have been understood in Judaism, how restorative justice is the underlying paradigm of Jewish law with the one exception being intentional murder. But in this special case of capital justice, the entire legal system is set on eliminating the death penalty so as not to risk killing even one innocent suspect. The famous Rabbinic dictum that "to save a life is to save an entire world" is used by the Rabbis in Mishnah Sanhedrin to argue for saving the life of the suspect in a capital case, for when we use the death penalty, and should we be wrong (common in America), we have done irretrievable harm to the fabric of the universe.

After Moshe recounts the 10 Commandments --the 10 "word-statements"-- in Deuteronomy chapter 5, we get the Shema and the Ve-Ahavta, we must Hearken to "these words," incribe them in our hearts, and return God's love by loving through teaching these words. What are the words? Given the context of chapter 5, it would make sense these are the 10 Commandments, perhaps to be the text of the mezuzah and teaching the VeAhavta is exhorting. Of course, the Rabbis argue vociferously that this cannot be, and just gives unwarranted support to Karaites and others who deny the Torah by reducing it to the 10 Commandments. (The Rabbis have some justification for their argument.) So "these words which I command you this day" become the entire set of teachings of the written Torah and our own interpretations that all happen through the act of God's love and our Love for God, and therefore the Mezuzah includes this selection about Love. What does it mean to love Torah? Delivered on the day of Tu B'Av, the annual Jewish "Valentine's Day" that celebrates falling in love and romance, I share my experience of love and loving a Torah that goes beyond sentences.

The oldest, continually used blessing in the world is the Torah's "Priestly Blessing." May God bless you [with bounty] and guard you. May God's face radiate grace (of getting your needs met) upon you. May God turn God's face to you [when you don't get what you need] so [you do not feel alone but meet God there and] God places peace within you. The Rabbis stress that the person blessing is merely a "window" to letting God in, but in this Dvar Torah I question whether this isn't exactly what we wish to avoid -- letting God in. We want to let us in! We spend our time building a world of domestic familiarity and home, and build our children up with their accomplishments. Transcendence runs absolutely against that: it puts you in the context of the Eternal drama, not your own: achievement, knowledge, and the cathedral of the self [we telling our hero stories] take a far second place in transcendence, where our ego is seen in its puniness, and we feel the calm of taking our place in the eternal dramas of humanity, nature, and experience. Transcendence teaches gratitude for participation in the human journey, calm, perspective, and the movement toward shalom (contentment) in one's lot, rather than protection. In this sermon, I ask how we lead our children to be prepared to encounter God, not us.

How do we reopen the synagogue after over a year of being virtual? For some it's procedural: distance appropriately, follow guidelines, limit numbers, maybe wait on the food. But the Temple is not a gathering of bodies, it's a gathering of souls. How do we reopen appropriately to be a holy community, one that recognizes each other as souls? One of my favorite mishnayot speaks to this, and I was happy to be scooped by Professor Naomi Kalish in applying it to us today: https://www.jtsa.edu/struggling-to-celebrate There are four categories of people who went up the downstaircase at the Temple, and down the up staircase: the one in mourning, the one caring for a relative, the one who has been isolated, and the one who has lost a precious object. In this Dvar Torah on Emor, I apply these to our norms for a holy reopening. Helpful picture: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Huldah_Gates3344.JPG

Leviticus ends with a long list of horrifying predictions (or curses) of the vicious suffering of the Israelites when they eventually enter the Land and break the covenant. Western Civilization has been shaped by European Christian intellectuals who created the unchallenged image (and therefore a Western bias) that the God of the Old Testament is a God who is disposed toward anger and punishment, who seems to enjoy punisment and retribution (and thus God had to be made flesh in the Son to introduce Love). In this podcast, I ask us to hear these verses as the words of the Mother, who, as in Wendell Berry's poem (which I read at the end) sees the Mother foreseeing one's sins, suffering in that foreknowledge with you, before you, with love and forgiveness already there symbolized by the made bed, the "you can always come home" that transcends the future into the past. Is the angry God we project, really the No-God of Jeremiah, the idol of our own making, which externalizes our own anger at climate change, social and racial inequality, rather than God the Mother who suffers along with us within the thorn bush of the Burning Bush but is not consumed?

Is Leviticus's insistence that those with skin afflictions (as well as having buried the dead) not go to Temple an exclusionary punishment for being sick? Or is that our modern reading which presumes that religion is exclusionary and judgmental? In this presentation, I use Ross Douthat's essay "Can the Meritocracy Find God? The secularization of America probably won’t reverse unless the intelligentsia gets religion" as a way to talk about America's prejudices against religion, and my particular concern that even Jewish leaders like me are too silent in the face of the current hype that all the cool innovation (and funding) is happening outside of our legacy institutions [which actually is an unchallenged claim mainly by people who don't go to synagogue] and that our success as communities should be judged as to how easy we make it for unaffiliated Jews to get their needs met without having to attend the Temple as it exists in our day. Is that respectful of the Temple?

As the percentage of Jews opting for cremation has risen from around 2% to over 20% in twenty years, how do we balance the mitzvah of burial of Jewish remains with the prohibition on cremation?

Inspired by the teachings of the great American ceramicist, Richard DeVore, I examine what the mishkan tells us about the nature of artistic composition, drawing a stark contrast between Golden Calves and Purposeful Composition, in Exodus, and especially in how we live our lives.

What were the Keruvim, the two hybrid beast angels 10 cubits high protecting the Ark of the Covenant, and from between whom God speaks? I rehearse all the theories, and end with a Maimonidean vision of what the angel as an extension of God's presence really is.

Given that some of the most influential narratives and Torah legislation are but a few verses long, why is so much of the book of Exodus chapters and chapters of detailed, repetitive descriptions of the instructions and building of the Tabernacle (Mishkan), the priestly uniforms, the utensils, the hundreds of curtain rods and hooks? I answer this question through my reflecting on the observations of Henry Louis Gates in his PBS Series (during Black History month) on the history of the Black Church in America.

No statement by God seems more morally challenging than the prophet Samuel's demand for the complete annhilation of the Amalekites and their animals, followed by his condemnation of Saul for failing to kill King Agag and the choicest of the animals. The Amalekites are equated with the nature of evil itself, and so the resurgence of evil and especially genocidal anti-Semitism throughout the rest of time is somehow linked to the failure to "complete the job" of vanquishing them earlier on. In this very brief teaching, I try to learn a lesson we might otherwise resist from this troublesome piece of Tanakh: the tendency to fail to complete the job, often through unacknowledged selfish interest that hides beneath the seemingly noble action of "moving on."

In this 5 minute teaching, I read a poem by Zbigniew Herbert and then share a seriously short spiritual practice that involves receiving the deepest of advice. In that, I connect the prayer Hashkiveinu to the Mourners Kaddish to my own experience of practicing it.

As America faces what to do and think about impeachment, I reflect on the dramatic difference between the book of Jonah and account of the final plagues in Exodus where God hardens Pharoah's heart. In the former, God is so anxious to accept an apology, move on, and look to the future that Jonah wants to refuse God's service, and in the other God prevents the moving on that Moshe is so anxious to get to.

Parashah Bo repeatedly connects the memory of slavery to the establishment of Jewish rituals for all time, from the main features of the Passover seder to the First Fruit offerings in the Temple to ones we forget to associate with the memory of slavery like tefillin. (Later, even Shabbat will be firmly connected to the memory of slavery.) We in America have done the opposite by divorcing our institutions from the memory of slavery: case in point, the Filibuster which was not a patriotic institution of the founding fathers but rather an attempt to preserve slavery by Southern senators, and then to preserve Jim Crow laws. So should we destroy our American institutions because of these connections? Are we to be anarchists? No, the Torah tells us to connect the memory of slavery to taking action in this world to make God's dream for us come true. That's our imperative. Reconnect our institutions to their roots so we can be open to what it is God is dreaming for us, what God is dreaming for America.

I examine the sin of Geneivat Daat -- theft of another's consciousness through words that might be parse-able but lead another to think something is true which isn't-- as the prevalent sin in a world of fragmented media tailored to incite us, and I relate this to former Jewish Theological Seminar chancellor Arnold Eisen's insight that we readers cheer Moshe on in his riotous act in the name of justsice, only to wonder how we found ourselves in that dubious moral place.

The saga of Yosef is about dreaming beginning to end, with the parashah of Miketz as itself operating according to dream logic. Are dreams special in the Torah, unlike ours, as some kind of prophecy? Or is much of Genesis calling our attention to the God world all around us, the one we only know through "knowledge by inacquaintance" (Abraham Joshua Heschel)? Is it telling us that our conventional "common denominator" way of processing and understanding the world is flawed, limited, one of not knowing God is in this place, that other souls are in this place? How do we get there? And how could we possibly when we deprive our teenagers, our children, ourselves of sufficient sleep to even align ourselves with the world our dreams teach us to enter in Torah consciousness?

I relate Jacob's dream of the stairway to heaven and his dream of God-wrestling to the therapeutic uses of psilocybin to treat PTSD, depression, addiction, and end-of-life fear.

The stories of Jacob being defrauded by Lavan are taken to be the plot of the famous period of Jacob working for Lavan for 20 years before fleeing in the middle of the night. In this teaching, I show that this is a misunderstanding. Jacob has worked for 20 years for Lavan without being paid, but only 6 of those years are for Jacob and his arrangements with Lavan! The first 7 years are to earn money that goes directly to Leah, and the next 7 years are for the money that goes to Rachel! The story is about THEIR being defrauded! Why does everyone miss this? The reason is that we misunderstand Jewish marriage: when we read a Ketubah, when we read the literal meanings of the Jewish ceremony, we presume this is an acquisition of the woman like she's property being transferred from father to husband. But that's a misreading: the dowry --which comes from the father or from the woman herself-- is added to the "bride price" (money paid by the man), and the sum of these are then given to the woman in a kind of "lockbox" that cannot be touched and belongs to her. When we understand this, the Biblical story, the nature of the ketubah, and the mutuality of the covenant of marriage (which is not a form of acquisition) are transformed into their proper perspective.