Sermons

06/22/2019

Baha’alotcha 5779: “Egyptian Cucumbers”

When I was a child I would often cry on the first day of school. It wasn’t because I hated school or didn’t like my teachers. It wasn’t because I was upset about the classmates assigned to my class that year. I cried because of nostalgia for the prior school year. The experience of returning…
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06/15/2019

Naso 5779: “One is Obligated to Teach Torah to His Daughters: From a Feminist Satire to Democratic Elitism”

Starting at age four, our children study Torah with their mother before bedtime on most evenings. Several months ago, as they learned the Mishnah of Tractate Shabbat, I overheard our twins reading a mishnah with their mother which was confusing, frightening, and even a bit offensive. :עַל שָׁלשׁ עֲבֵרוֹת נָשִׁים מֵתוֹת בִּשְׁעַת לֵדָתָן, עַל שֶׁאֵינָן…
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06/01/2019

Behukotai 5779: “Safety in Numbers”

Some of you may know that I went to a specialized math and science high school. I don’t often draw upon that element of my education but I do want to work through an arithmetic problem with you all this morning. Five is to one hundred, as one hundred is to…. Well…five times twenty is…
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05/18/2019

Emor 5779: “For Stranger and Citizen Alike”

More than 800 years ago Maimonides, Rambam, penned a letter to a convert to Judaism who had taken on the name Ovadia. Ovadia had written to Rambam wondering if he could recite the same berakhot as other Jews when those blessings or prayers refer to God’s relationship with our biological ancestors and events in our…
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04/06/2019

Tazria 5779: “Identity and Stigmatization”

There are two theories of tumah v’taharah. There are two ways of thinking about the vast system of purity and impurity laws that dominate so much of the middle sections of Vayikra. One position, which was made famous by Rambam, can be summarized by the phrase “tumah happens.” I’d love to make a t-shirt with…
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03/23/2019

Tzav 5779: “Two Paths Converge”

There was once a Jew who lived and worked in Shushan HaBirah, the capital city of the vast and sprawling Persian Empire. This Jew had intimate access to the king of Persia and was an object of the king’s favor. Eventually, this Jew realized that the needs of the Jewish community itself needed redress and…
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03/16/2019

Vayikra 5779: “The Memory of the Righteous is a Blessing”

You never know what will happen when you send an email to fifty thousand people. Several times a year, Sara’s employer, the Jewish educational website, Sefaria, sends out emails, in her name, to tens of thousands of regular users announcing some new educational resource, a new text that has been added to the digital database,…
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03/09/2019

Pekudei 5779: “Beyond Identity”

Have you ever had the experience of thinking of the perfect comeback to an argument once it is too late to deploy that snappy comeback in real life? This happened to me several years ago when I was sitting on an inter-denominational rabbinic panel and my Reform colleague said, “I believe in Reform Judaism because…
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03/02/2019

Vayakhel 5779: “Six Days You Shall Work and the Seventh Shall be Shabbat”

For many years, Princeton University invited those high school seniors who had been accepted to Princeton to spend a weekend there in the spring as part of an effort to encourage them to accept the admissions offer. The Jewish community took this opportunity very seriously and each year a large and festive Shabbat dinner was planned and the…
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02/23/2019

Ki Tissa 5779: “To Be or Not to Be”

To be or not to be; that is the question. הושִׁיעָה אֶת עַמֶָ ובָרְ אֶת נַחֲלָתֶָ ורעֵם וְנַשְּׂאֵם עַד הָעולָם Old McDonald had a farm; ee ei, ee ei, oh. What do these three sentences have in common? They each have ten words and they can each be used in place of directly counting the number…
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