Sermons
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While packing up our apartment last week I found these handwritten notes which are my father’s notes from the speech he delivered at my bar mitzvah. I don’t remember much of the speech itself because, as I remember it, my father was so overcome by emotion, he was not able to make it through most…
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On April 15th, 1936, a group of Palestinian insurgents loyal to Izz Ad-Din al-Qassam, shot and killed two Jewish motorists on the road between Nablus and Tulkaram. Days later two Palestinian laborers were shot and killed while sleeping in a hut on a banana farm near Petach Tikvah. Wide scale violence then erupted which claimed…
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There are two great movie versions of the story of Yetziat Mitzraim, the exodus from Egypt: Steven Spielberg’s Prince of Egypt and Cecille B. Demille’s The Ten Commandments. Both draw heavily from midrashim to flesh out sparse details of the Torah’s own narrative. Both can be watched as a sort of modern midrash that reflects…
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As you know I live in Chicago but, thanks to the Internet, I sometimes listen to the radio in New York. Over the past two weeks, I have been listening to an “oral history call-in” that Brian Lehrer hosted for fifteen minutes each day on his New York public radio show. He invited listeners to…
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I’ve told you before about the Christian family we met when we lived in Jerusalem fifteen years ago. They practiced a very austere form of Protestant Christianity which attempted to purify Christianity from what they saw as foreign acretians that Catholicism had grafted onto a biblical faith. Since Leviticus says “Eleh Mo’adei Hashem” these are…
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I want to tell you a story about a brilliant idea that I had for a shul program and why I never implemented the program. I thought it would be a valuable experience for our shul to convene a mock-election prior to the 2019 elections in Israel. With each ballot we could ask for a…
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Many of you know that our twins have been serving as weekday gabba’im since they each became bar mitzvah about 18 months ago. It has been a big relief for me to have them help to keep everything running smoothly on weekday mornings when we read Torah. They have been taking turns being gabbai rishon…
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An oxymoron is a two word phrase that is made up of two opposite words like “civil war” “sweet sorrow” “plastic silverware” “old news” and “deafening silence.” These words manage to associate with one another despite the inherent dissonance of two opposites in close proximity; oxymorons somehow convey meaning that is different from either of…
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One festive day when we lived in Princeton we joined many of our students to celebrate a hachnasat sefer Torah – the dedication of a new Torah scroll that was sponsored by a Jewish organization on campus where we did not work. A Torah scroll, lovingly written by hand, is a time consuming and expensive…
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The Prophet Elijah, Eliyahu HaNavi convened a great theological debate with the idolatrous prophets of Baal. As recounted in I Kings 18, Eliyahu alone was left alive among the true prophets of God and he had assembled four hundred fifty prophets of Baal for a theological debate. This debate was unusual. The entire population of…
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Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 