Judaism for the Thinking Person

This year's traditional teaching on a Law of Passover (per the tradition of Shabbat Hagadol). For a download of the text I'm referring to: https://www.rabbinicalassembly.org/sites/default/files/public/jewish-law/holidays/pesah/b-dikat-hameitz.pdf

The Iran War began at Purim (about Persia, now Iran) and now we're at Passover with Persia yet again as we are required to read Malachi. The Bible actually ends in the Persian period with the triumvirate of Ezra, Nehemiah, and Malachi. I share some history, some Bible, and some modern absurd framing that exemplifies the idiotic antisemitism rampant in our popular media as this war rages on.

There is a loss that takes place between the end of Exodus, with the people donating materials and building the tabernacle in small groups excitedly, and the beginning of Leviticus with the routinization of altar offerings and a professional class to facilitate essential social functions. This loss is precisely the one the great thinkers Max Weber and Jurgen Habermas described in their most important works. It's not accident Habermas died with the scroll rolled to the space in between the two Torah books.

This is a Drash on Parashat Tetzaveh, an Exodus portion about the priestly clothing that usually elicits shallow reflections on clothes. Instead, I try to bring to life the amazing living language of garments in Jewish history -- a language of norms embedded in visual cues. It's a language modern culture has thrown away, and the values that go with it, and we are the poorer for it.

For parashat Terumah, the Rabbis pair a Torah reading about Terumah, donation from the heart, with the account of Solomon's building of the first Temple, which was done using "mas," forced labor, the customary tax of the time. But wasn't that what was forced on the Israelites in Egypt, and to which much of the Torah is a direct response? Shouldn't we be just a little bit uncomfortable?

The 2nd Commandment says not to make a chiseled thing part of our worship, yet the 10 Commandments actually are a chiseled thing! In this podcast, I show how the Jewish tradition the notion that it's okay in this instance because we make divine speech --words chiseled on these chiseled stones!-- the center of our worship practice. This changes everything: holiness comes through the holiness of speech, both divine in creating worlds and in creating instructions for how to live, and through our own speech. Instead of an image or an idol, we have speech. I also cover how the 10 Statements (Torah) became the 10 Commandments (Christianity) and so the Rabbis renamed them the 10 Speakings.

My remarks from a local rally.

Drawing on the book "(Un)kind: How 'Be Kind' Entrenches Sexism" by Victoria Smith and Ellen Scherr's essay "The Neuroscience of Why You Suddenly Can’t Pretend Anymore," I examine Jacob's deathbed blessings to his sons, which are impartial statements of fact with neither personal commentary nor people-pleasing softening. I see in my own life the draw of middle age to convey factual statements without personal judgment, but the societal messages that everything has to be couched in uplifting, taking-care-of-others'-feelings language or you're a bad person or a bad supervisor.

At the end of Genesis, Joseph centralizes the agricultural system of Egypt, saving the country from collapse due to upcoming years of bad crops (e.g. due to drought), but turning farmers into serfs upon their own land in the process. The Rabbis debate whether Joseph did a good thing or a bad thing to the people. I take two stories from the headlines to take each side of this debate: first, the collapse of American farms due to corporate monopolies (turning American farmers into serfs on their own land), and second, the upcoming collapse of great world cities like Tehran if they refuse to centralize power and exercise eminent domain to enforce collective action.

My Kol Nidrei 2025 Sermon on how our phones are amplifying the centrifugal force of the pull of our individual lives, sacrificing the centripetal force of community, by holding out a fake community, a false version of ourselves (the shadow masquerading as the soul), and building Temples for us to worship the A.I. gods.

This is a revision of a podcast I released several years ago. It focuses on Isaac as the patriarch of Imposter Syndrome. In my own life, I've come to make peace with my own Imposter Syndrome, seeing the anxiety I must live with as a gift that leads me not to shame, but to service. It has made me appreciate Isaac enormously.

I relate the debate from Bereishit Rabbah to This American Life episode 550.

Most of us have been avoiding the painful conversations with friends and family over Gaza. Why? It seems like we have no common frame of reference, and so it hardly seems worth it. In this Rosh Hashanah sermon, I do something a little bizarre: I use Judaism's main halakhic code about war -- Maimonides' codification of all the Torah's statements on war-- to illuminate the war we are at with ourselves. My hope is that it opens us all up a little to each other.

Miracle may be the most misunderstood concept in Judaism. While some Jewish sects officially (like Chabad), and most Jews unofficially, construe "miracles" as supernatural interventions in the nature, as in Christianity, the Jewish tradition tends to understand the word "miracle" (in Biblical Hebrew: "nes") in a far more subtle way. In this sermon, I explain the true meaning of "nes" as "sign" or "that which is risen above the ordinary" to help us deepen our sense of God's presence in our everyday lives, and change our concept of God from a Being within reality to the Being that is Reality.

In this long section of the Torah, where Miriam and Aaron are disciplined by God for challenging Moses, where Moses tries yet again to resign his leadership, where the 70 Elders to help Moshe go ahead and prophesy, but strangely nothing seems to come from it, I am struck by how much the parashah speaks to our time, where the strangest of leaders are getting elected. We learn from Torah that leadership is not just about being prophetic or charismatic or elected, leadership is relational.

Rabbi Irwin Kula reminds us that when we engage deeply with Torah, it can serve "as our mirror" which illuminates our inner complexities, strivings, horizon of significance, so we can better understand ourselves, others, and the world. In this presentation, I note how the Biblical story of Pinchas (who gets his own name on a parashah!) is a little different than most Biblical narratives in that most generate debates that quote textual evidence, but Pinchas usually just has the binary of "you either read it one way or the other." In that, it is our mirror in a more immediate way than usual. I compare the Rabbinic view and legend of Pinchas as the Biblical "Superman" with the recent James Gunn movie, quoting from, among other places, the excellent essay by Will Rahn.

We have grown accustomed to seeing Ethics and Holiness as virtually the same thing. I show that in order to properly understand Heschel's interlocking concepts of Blessing (berakhah), Faith (emunah), Awe (yirah), and Commandedness (Mitzvah), one needs to grasp that Ethics and Holiness are VERY different. This podcast has been edited to remove the Q&A, which sometimes found the material uncomfortable to their sensibilities.

The vast majority of work on Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel is academic: summaries, clarification, footnotes and so on. In this series of classes, I'm here to show you how to live Heschel's religious philosophy, not understand it. In this first lecture, I show how one begins this process by first gathering three philosophies: 1) Schleiermacher, 2) Pragmatism, and 3) Phenomenology. With these basics, one is ready to identify what connecting to God looks like, whether you've ever done it yourself, and how it creates and informs Judaism.

There are two New Years on the Jewish calendar (in addition to the new years for trees and for flocks): Rosh Hashanah and First of Nissan (announced on Shabbat HaChodesh). The deep spiritual connection between the two is emphasized by reading the haftarah from Ezekiel, who sees the journey from the 1st of Nissan to Pesach as an equal mirror of the journey from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, and for whom Pesach is the real Yom Kippur. There is a deep and very practical message here: most of our Rosh Hashanah new years' resolutions may fall apart following Sukkot, but the best time to really enact those resolutions in a sustainable way is to use Pesach as the renewal of putting those resolutions into practice. Especially with the change and limitation on diet, the open discussion of what it means to serve God and your own soul during the Seder, THIS is the time to restart doing those resolutions. We're only halfway through the year: you've got six months of leaning into the homestretch, pulled by the gravity of the upcoming holidays. What are your new years' resolutions? How can you implement them during Pesach?

We often fail to appreciate the virtues of the Shepherd period of Judaism, which preceded the Israelite period. In this dvar Torah, I focus on the virtues of sustainability and repairability of the portable sanctuary (Mishkan) over the permanent version (Temple), and I apply it to legislation before state congresses today.