Category: 5781
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Nitzavim 5781: “We are Enough”
Our daughter recently told Sara, while they were learning Humash together a few nights ago, “Moshe is so much better than Abraham and everyone else. They’re all just like: “Yes, God, okay.” Moshe has a life.”…
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Re’eh 5781: “The Place I Shall Choose”
I am going to summarize the biblical Book of Kings: “And then there was King X, who did evil in the eyes of God and did not destroy the bamot – the private altars. And then…
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Eikev 5781: “The Tablets and the Lost Ark”
Which comes first: the chicken or the egg? Is this a semantic question? Is this a philosophical question? I don’t know. How about this one: Do we store our Torah scrolls in an ark, or does…
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Va’Etchanan 5781: “Facing East”
Let’s orient ourselves geographically. Right now I am facing west with the eastern wall of the shul behind me. To my right is the north and to my left is the south. Everyone following? Good. Now,…
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Devarim 5781: “Whose Words?”
Last week the New York Times reported on a scandal that is being called “sermongate.” The newly elected president of the Southern Baptist convention was caught delivering a sermon that had been delivered just a short…
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Matot-Ma’asai 5781: “Lovingly Counted”
Last week, a day or two before Shabbat I watched a television interview with Colonel Golan Vach, one of the commanders of the Israeli rescue and recovery mission in Surfside Florida. The interviewer for CNN asked…
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Pinchas 5781: “The Seventy Nations & the Jews”
Elevator banks in large buildings are now controlled by sophisticated software that determines the most efficient way to deploy elevators to people who want to use them. Send the elevator on the fourth floor to p;ick…
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Korach 5781: “Disputes for the Sake of Heaven”
The Mishnah is the only ancient religious text that preserves multiple opinions. Chapter after chapter over tractate after tractate concerning one topic after another list majority and minority opinions, dissents and disagreements, often with no explicit…
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Shlach 5781: “Grasshoppers & Antisemitism”
There is an old joke about a Jewish man who bought the weekly antisemitic newspaper. His friends were confused and eventually asked him why he was purchasing the antisemitic newspaper. He replied that whenever he reads…
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Baha’alotcha 5781: “Burnout”
There have been a lot of complaints recently about the postal service and so I assumed they were to blame when I received three weeks worth of New Yorker magazines in the mail all within three…
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 