Sermons
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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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Where do you go for help when you are facing a hard decision? This summer in Israel I had a chance to chat and learn with an old teacher of mine and he told me a story about his own father who left his hometown in Germany in the early 1930s to study at one…
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The Torah shares that on the holiest day of the year, Yom Kippur, the holiest person alive (the kohen gadol, the high priest), would enter the holiest place on earth (the Kodesh HaKodashim – the Holy of Holies in the Temple), and the confessions he made at that time in that space would earn atonement…
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People often share things with friends that they would be embarrassed to tell their rabbi. A family friend made a disclosure like that over the summer when we were in Israel. When he and I spoke, on a Shabbat afternoon in July, this man, a family friend for decades, had already been in Israel for…
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This August the New York Times published a story on electronic productivity-monitoring of white-collar employees, many more of whom are now working remotely away from the watchful eye of their supervisors and colleagues. The article drew a lot of attention for the ways in which the article itself incorporated the very technologies about which it…
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A week or so ago I helped Akiva and Hillel complete a homework assignment for their 9th grade Talmud class. Their assignment was to prepare a selection from the commentary of Tosafot to the chapter of Talmud they are studying this year. The Tosafot commentaries were written by scholars in Northern France and Germany in…
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When my father came to America in 1949 on the RMS Queen Elizabeth, the largest ocean liner in the world, among his fellow passengers was Winston Churchill, (then leader of the opposition) on his way to a week of meetings in New York. Because my father was so young and so small he was able…
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Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 