Sermons
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At the 1991 Grammy Awards Bob Dylan received a Lifetime Achievement Award. Jack Nicholson handed an award to Dylan who then made a cryptic statement (and I won’t try in any way to imitate Bob Dylan’s iconic voice so you’ll just have to imagine it in your head): …my daddy, he didn’t leave me much,…
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I spent six years of my life as a full-time yeshiva student and one major focus, of at least the first years, was acquiring the textual fluency and Hebrew literacy to open the Jewish bookshelf. I cannot overstate how transformative it has been to my life to have unmediated access to centuries of Jewish wisdom…
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I spent three weeks in Jerusalem this summer, but before that I was in Paris for seven days so of course my most extensive conversations in Hebrew took place in Paris where I explained where I lived and worked to a representative of the Sokhnut who was in Paris for a series of work meetings,…
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I’m sure I’ve shared the complaint with you before that one of the major occupational hazards of my profession is that I so rarely have the opportunity to listen to great derashot or divrei torah. One of the highlights of my trips to Yerushalayim is the opportunity to hear thought provoking and morally relevant divrei…
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Shabbat Shalom. It is wonderful to be back with you all this Shabbat. I am filled with gratitude for everyone who stepped up, in big ways and small ways, to sustain the shul during my absence. I saw many of you over Tisha b’Av when I couldn’t exchange greetings and it is so great to…
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In the 1950s my teacher Rabbi Yehudah Amital was a faculty member at a yeshiva in Rehovot where he worked alongside his cousin-by-marriage Rabbi Elazer Menachem Schach. The two teachers argued incessantly about all the hot topics that rabbis debated in the 1950s while sharing cigarettes. Time passed and Rav Shach became the rosh yeshiva…
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There is a phrase, made popular on the Internet but used often enough in conversation too, to describe someone who fails at what is ostensibly a simple task: You had one job. Several memorable examples come from a website called “Cake Wrecks” which chronicles professionally decorated cakes that have gone horribly wrong, such as a…
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Circles of Blessing Every community contains conflict. Whenever people gather, and try to live together, there will be differences of opinion and personalities that clash. I once lived in a community with a kohen who had devised a unique method of resolving conflict. On one occasion it appeared to me that he had a challenging…
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Fractals are geometric shapes, which can appear in nature, or can be generated by computer graphics, in which a self-repeating pattern can be seen at any scale of magnification. A snail’s spiral, the coil of an unfolding fern leaf, the structure of snowflakes are all natural demonstrations of fractal patterns. The Mandelbrot set is an…
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Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 