Category: Social Justice

Reclaiming the Spirituality of Food & Omer Week 3 (P. Shemini)

4/20/2025

A special teaching for Earth Week.

Emerging from Passover, whose most outward manifestation is foods we eat and don't eat, maybe it's inevitable that the "food" part of this week's Torah portion stands out. "Kosher" and "not kosher" categories emerge from Torah's traditional list of what one does and doesn't eat.
Turns out, though, that the spirituality of food is far deeper than whether we eat shellfish or pork.

The real question is whether we can reclaim the spirituality of food – for ourselves, for core values, and for our planet.

You Are the High Priest – and Omer 5785 (P. Tzav & Passover)

4/6/2025

The matzah that is the Passover bread is about many things. Amidst the crunch and crumbles we might find humility, ancestry, community and reminders of liberation.

Hidden in matzah's layers of meaning (and this week's Torah portion) is one more thing – a profound empowerment and call to each of us.

Giving, Up (P. Terumah)

2/23/2025

In liberal Jewish life, mitzvah often is translated as "good deed" and tzedakah as "charity." To English speakers, both sound optional.

In Jewish life, however, they're not optional. They are mandatory and essential to Jewish continuity and resilience. The whole point is to rise, and lift others as we do, and together raise up the holy.

The Impossible Song of Our People (P. Beshallah)

2/2/2025

It was impossible. The liberation from bondage – our birth through the Sea of Reeds that opened into a birth canal – it could not happen.

Yet here we are, and we've been talking about it ever since. The splitting Sea animates Jewish liturgy. It drives Judaism's identity of ongoing human liberation from bondage, xenophobia and hate.

So what to do when modern life presents us with yet more high walls and seemingly unbridgeable chasms? What now?

Come to Narcissist (P. Bo)

1/26/2025

We all have emotional and psychological vested interests in seeming externally to be our best selves. Most of us, we hope, respond to these impulses by actually trying to be our best selves in the world. Our insides aspire to match our outsides.

For others, the optics of manipulated perception are the primary reality or even only reality they recognize or allow others to see.

The effects on communities and society can be brutal, and we must stand up to them.

The Moral Arc Discovered (P. Vaera)

1/20/2025

No liberation is easy. Each begins with a promise that seems too good to be true. Even a promise can seem fanciful during the squeeze of hurt or bondage – like a fantasy, or a delusion. If there's a moral arc at all, at first it can seem out of reach.

So it was for Dr. King. So it was for Moses. So it is for every liberation and transformation.

Showing Up, Taking Responsibility (P. Vayigash)

12/29/2024

It's not my fault. Why should I take responsibility for any part of it? We're all prone to say so.

Yet our penchant to claim rightness has spiritual and practical limits. Our acts and omissions ripple out far beyond their space and time, and Jewishly we claim collective responsibility for much seemingly beyond ourselves.

Just ask the guy whom Jews are named for.

The Flags Up Front (P. Toledot)

11/24/2024

We're all global citizens of a shared and fragile planet. And at the same time, Jewish life's public vitality – and with it, global diversity and genuine belonging – tends to ebb and flow in cycles of societal turbulence. Yet again, Jews and other minorities face a recurring existential question: who are we relative to where we are? In the U.S. flag's stars and stripes, there is still enough starlight for all of us.

The Fever Dreams (P. Vayera)

11/10/2024

Spirituality is partly about how our consciousness flows – how we experience our own hearts, minds and spirits. This flow can change for many reasons – misfortune and suffering, shock and awe, profound joy and love. The shift can feel like a fever dream – intense, unreal but totally real, in us and also beyond us.

Maybe the whole country is having a fever dream now. If so, we can take lessons from our spiritual ancestors... and there yet can be so much good.

On Love and War – Sermon for Yom Kippur 5785 (2024)

10/12/2024

Opinions and arguments. War. Antisemitism. Elusive hopes for peace. Pride and prejudice. Morality in the crosshairs. What we're about. What we want to be about. What we crave to be about. And back to opinions and arguments, and war, and antisemitism....

Amidst the swirling chaos of the year that's been, and so much hurt still ongoing, what keystones to Jewish spiritual life can secure our foundations? What can help keep our hearts open amidst all?

<<Previous

Reclaiming the Spirituality of Food & Omer Week 3 (P. Shemini)

You Are the High Priest – and Omer 5785 (P. Tzav & Passover)

Giving, Up (P. Terumah)

The Impossible Song of Our People (P. Beshallah)

Come to Narcissist (P. Bo)

The Moral Arc Discovered (P. Vaera)

Showing Up, Taking Responsibility (P. Vayigash)

The Flags Up Front (P. Toledot)

The Fever Dreams (P. Vayera)

On Love and War – Sermon for Yom Kippur 5785 (2024)

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