Divrei Torah/Torah Talks

These divrei torah have been delivered on High Holydays and on other occasions.

We are approaching the Aleynu, a prayer originally written for the Yamim Noraim, the Days of Awe, in which the concept of "tikkun olam," repair of the world, first enters our liturgy. In this prayer, we call out for the Creator of the Universe l'taken olam b'malchut Shaddai, to "repair the world with Godly power." The prayer goes on to imagine all people of the world coming together in the understanding that God is one, that we are all...Read more...

In this morning's Torah reading, we encounter a confounding and painful set of stories. How could Abraham and Sarah banish Hagar and Ishmael into the wilderness? How could Hagar abandon her son under a bush when she fears he is dying? How, in tomorrow's Torah reading, could Abraham believe that his God demanded the sacrifice of his remaining son? 

However we might wish it to be otherwise, the authors of the Torah seem intent...Read more...

When I was in 5th grade, my family began attending services at the recently formed Fabrangen Havurah, in Washington DC. It was a member-led community that had no rabbi, although there were a number of rabbis and learned lay people in it.  I was actually the first young person to have a b-mitzvah at Fabrangen, way back in 1976, a personal point of pride! Ten years later, when I moved back to DC after college, I started going to...Read more...

These holidays are called many things in our tradition. Rosh Hashanah is known as Yom Din, the Day of Judgment, and as Yom HaZikaron, the Day of Remembrance. The ten days from Rosh Hashanah through Yom Kippur are called Aseret Yamei Teshuvah, the Ten Days of Teshuvah. They are also called the Yamim Noraim, the Days of Awe – or, more literally, the "Awe-full Days," and the double meaning is intentional. An experience of "awe" was not...Read more...

On Yom Kippur in 2017, a few months after the horrifying white nationalist rally and violence in Charlottesville, VA, I gave a talk on “slavery and its atonement.” I was wrestling with how our failure as a country to properly reckon with and atone for  the foundational sins of Native American genocide and the enslavement of Black people had led us to that terrifying moment. 

It's revealing to reflect on what...Read more...

[With gratitude to the anthology Naming God: Avinu Malkeinu – Our Father, Our King, edited by Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman, Jewish Lights, 2015, from whence I gleaned much of the information in this talk.]

Sometime in the 2nd century C.E., around the year 100, there was a great drought in the land of Israel. According to a story in the Talmud, one of the leading rabbis of the time, Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, gathered the community...Read more...

The High Holydays, these Ten Days of Teshuvah, are fundamentally about life and death.  On Rosh Hashanah, we celebrate the birthday of the world and of humanity.  We sing “Hayom Harat Olam,” “Today the world is created.”   The Rosh Hashanah Torah and haftarah portions tell stories of birth – the birth of our ancestor Isaac, the birth of the prophet Samuel. We celebrate...Read more...

It’s both strange and remarkable that our Torah reading this morning contains a story that portrays our founding ancestors, Abraham and Sarah, in such an unpleasant light.  Sarah, trying to protect her son Isaac, demands that Abraham cast Hagar and their son Ishmael out into the wilderness, and Abraham goes along with this heartless act.

It’s actually sort of strange that this story of Hagar and Ishmael is in the Torah...Read more...

Near the beginning of the pandemic, as Dorshei Tzedek and every other congregation shifted to a completely new way of doing things, my colleague Barbara Penzner remarked to me that she had heard another rabbi refer to this as a “Temple destruction moment.”  This felt, and continues to feel, very apt, on many levels.

So, what is a “Temple destruction...Read more...

In the Torah portions that we read over the two days of Rosh Hashanah, people hear God speaking to them in a variety of difficult situations. Heartbroken at Sarah’s demand that he kick Hagar and Ishmael out of their home, Abraham hears God instructing him to do what Sarah says.  Out in the wilderness, afraid her son is about to die, Hagar hears the reassuring voice of a divine messenger, telling her that she and her son will be fine....Read more...

Sixteen years ago, in May of 2003, I was teaching the second session of a class on Death and Dying in Jewish tradition.  I got a message after the class that Gina, my spouse, was trying to reach me, and she had asked me to come right home after the class.  When I got home, she told me that my father, Bill, was gone; he had died suddenly of a heart attack a few hours before.  He was 64.

Read more...

It is both intriguing and confounding that the section of Torah chosen to be read on Rosh Hashanah are the chapters that we read today and tomorrow, Genesis 21 and 22.  Sarah’s jealousy of Hagar and Ishmael, Abraham expelling them into the wilderness, Hagar placing Ishmael under a bush to die, Abraham nearly sacrificing his son Isaac—these are difficult stories.

Of course, there are also redemptive...Read more...

Erev Rosh Hashanah 5779

PDF:  Erev RH Talk 5779-Teshuvah & Appliances.pdf

There are many ways my life has changed in the two years since my spouse, Gina, passed away. I recently realized that this is the first time in my life that I have been the sole person responsible for the upkeep of a house.  Until the year I turned 40, when I acquired my first mortgage with Gina, I had always lived in someone else’s...Read more...

Yom Kippur 5779

PDF: Lovingkindness and Truth Will Meet.pdf

In 1974, when I was in 7th grade, my teacher took our class to a Congressional hearing on Capitol Hill.  We sat in a small room on wooden benches, listening to the testimony of a very elderly man, one of the very few survivors of the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890.  The hearings were about a proposal to pay reparations to survivors and descendants...Read more...

Rosh Hashanah I 5778

PDF: RH1 Talk 5778 - Reconstructing Peoplehood.pdf

I have a friend and former employer, Jerome Segal, who a number of years ago wrote a book about the Torah called Joseph’s Bones. I love the first paragraph of his introduction - it goes like this:  “Imagine a book club that has only one book. When the club members finish their book, they return to the beginning...Read more...