Sermons

10/27/2018

Vayera 5779: “This Was the Sin of Your Sister Sodom”

When Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev was appointed the rabbi of Berditchev, he sat down with the communal leaders to work out the terms by which they would guide the community. The communal leaders, wishing to protect their own prerogatives and to protect their rabbi’s time, proposed that they would only consult the rabbi concerning new policies…
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10/20/2018

Lekh Lekha 5779: “What’s in a Name?”

On Thursday afternoon a delegation of DePaul University undergraduates came to visit the shul. They are brought here each year by their professor as a field trip for a course they are taking on Chicago’s Jewish community. They had visited the other Lakeview congregations and I told them about our shul and our community and some of the…
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10/06/2018

Bereishit 5779: “Nothing but Evil All the Time”

The Torah is not a book of theology written by people. It is a book of anthropology written by God. The Torah is likewise not a book of philosophy and is not a book of history and is certainly not a book of geology or biology. Torah means “instructions” and the Torah is instructions for the…
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09/29/2018

Shabbat Hol HaMoed Sukkot 5779: “A Wicked One Endures Despite His Wickedness”

Hearing the book of Kohelet read can be a dark and sobering experience. It describes a world without justice and a world without protection and a world without meaning. Two phenomena in particular bother the author of Kohelet and animate his sense that the world has no justice, no protection, and no meaning. The righteous suffer and…
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09/22/2018

Ha’Azinu 5779: “Synesthesia”

Here we are again. It can be exhausting to jump into Shabbat and then Yom Tov so soon after the intensity of the yamim ha’nora’im but for all of that exhaustion, I believe that there is something very significant about the transition we are meant to undertake at this time. The most important brother and sister in…
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09/19/2018

Yom Kippur 5779: “Radiance”

In 1914 the European journal of psychoanalysis published an anonymous article. The editors justified printing the article because the author was “personally known to them” and had experience in psychoanalysis. It was subsequently revealed that the author was none other than Sigmund Freud himself who chose to publish this paper anonymously because its subject was not one…
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09/11/2018

Rosh Hashanah Day 2 5779: “Yesterday’s Paper Telling Yesterday’s News”

Almost ten years ago as we prepared to host our first Pesach sedarim in Princeton, a car pulled up in front of our home and stopped with a screech in a cloud of dust. Moments later the car zoomed away to squealing tires. When the dust settled, boxes containing Pesach china for twenty-five people were…
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09/10/2018

Rosh Hashanah Day 1 5779: “Speaking Poetry to Power”

In 1937, at the height of Stalin’s terror, the great Russian author Boris Pasternak was invited to attend a conference of Soviet writers. He knew that if he attended and participated in the conference, he would surely be arrested based on what he would say. He knew that if he stayed home, he would surely…
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09/08/2018

Nitzavim 5778: “Why Courage Matters”

In 1970, David Ifshin was president of the National Student Association and an activist in the movement to end United States involvement in the Vietnam War. In one of the most controversial and extreme actions undertaken by opponents of the war, Ifshin was part of a delegation of American students and activist that traveled to Hanoi where they…
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07/21/2018

Devarim 5778: “How?”

One of my teachers pointed out that two of the most common criticisms of Orthodox Judaism directly contradict each other. One criticism is that Orthodoxy is a fossil, never changing and frozen in the past. The other criticism is that we are constantly inventing new humras – new ways to be strict! “My parents’ Orthodox shul had mixed…
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