The doe sauntered away, leaving me wondering how we got here. Our glorious, sorry species. How did we end up living this way? So far removed from the rest of Creation that is just outside our door? How did we end up seeing this Earth so imperfectly, as if through carnival glass?
Read moreDreamers, Awake! You've Got Mail (Audio Podcast)
Talmud says a dream uninterpreted is like a letter left unread. What does this if-only-it-were-a-dream time have to say to us?
Read moreThe Mood that Came to Dinner (Audio Podcast)
Anxiety is of no use. It takes up space and disrupts work and relationships. But what if it’s squatting in your house, refusing to leave?
Read morePlanet of Priests (Audio Podcast)
Torah tells us that we are meant to be a nation of priests. It is our calling and our destiny. And now the call is even broader. Because right now we are being called to be a Planet of Priests. Each of us tending the altar of our relationships with God and Earth and each other. Offering up our guilt over the profit-driven, Earth-consuming culture we have allowed to take root. And offering up like fragrant incense our gratitude for the simple and intimate gifts of connection and food and shelter.
Read moreKoved – Audio Version
In this moment of unfolding epidemic, I am called to honor the complexity of the Creation we live in. This Creation in which uncountable species compete for space and survival, including the tiniest ones, who can sometimes, without malice, take down the mightiest among us.
Read moreMay the Angel: A Song for Parashat Vayechi
A song drawn from Jacob’s farewell blessing of his grandchildren.
Read moreChristmas Blessing
When interfaith dialogue goes terribly wrong.
In Suffering: Take Heart (Audio Podcast)
Lying on the floor of an airport, unable to move, one learns lessons about prayer, angelic protection, and being one with the Universe. Not always the lessons one would have wanted to learn.
Read moreBlossom of the Universe – Audio Podcast
Oath of Disloyalty – Chanted
I am not loyal to walls or cages.
I am not loyal to taunts or tweets.
Pray For Rain (Audio Podcast)
When I'm done with some of the prayers for specifics, I try to broaden out and pray for love. Always love. That it should enfold this world. That there should be a field of love so thick, so viscous, that it slows bullets and catches falling people.
When I pray, at some point, it is no longer me lofting prayers into the world; it is the world drawing prayers out of me…
Read moreQueer Medicine for Dark Times (Audio Podcast)
When Shabbat falls in the darkest part of the month, the Jewish world reads Torah's queerest story. What is the medicine?
Read moreBody of Soul (Audio Podcast)
Whether or not we agree with the laws in Leviticus, there is something important about Torah's understanding that the physical body produces spiritual states. Our bodies affect the spiritual fabric of the community. So how do we include our bodies in our spiritual lives? They deserve it.
Read moreSerenissima – Audio Podcast
And indeed as you stand in the Scola Tedesca and look up at the women's gallery, you see what looks like a theater loge. There are low upright pillars to about knee level, and then a gilded latticework screen up to perhaps the neck of a seated woman, and above that it is open. This gallery is not meant to hide the women, but to foster flirtation.
Read moreTorah the Musical (Audio)
If Torah were a musical, what sort would it be? For Shabbat Shirah, a diversion into the Broadway version of Torah, for which the Parting of the Sea ends Act I.
Read moreJoseph the Matriarch (Audio)
We are now in the annual 4-week saga of Joseph, and I find myself eyeing him across the ages. I see him young, middle aged and, at long last, at the end of his life, settling in to be a grandmother, the matriarch of his line. (Audio version.)
Read moreThe Persistence of Shabbat (Post-Pittsburgh) – Audio
We don't always say yes to what Shabbat offers. Maybe we say no more often than we say yes. But she never gets the hint. And she never gives up on us. She keeps showing up at the door in all her beauty, the Shechinah robed in time, with the fierceness of lions and the voice of songbirds. And so it is also after a week like this one. A horrible, unthinkable week, here she is again. Despite it all.
Read moreJourney of Return (Audio)
Yom Kippur sermon 2018, about my visit to my great-great-grandfather’s grave in Baden-Württemberg, and what it taught me about teshuvah.
Read moreInto the Unknown (Audio)
In fifteen minutes, or for some of us less, we left it all behind. For the sake of life, for the sake of survival, we left it all behind. Most of us, but not all of us, were able to go back to our smoke-steeped houses in a week or ten days. But on that first night it was the same for all of us: we didn't know if we would have a home to go home to. On that first night, we experienced letting go and leaving behind. With lech lecha in our ears, we grabbed those few things, threw them in the car, and hit the gas pedal into the Unknown.
Read moreShechinah, at the Art Institute (Podcast)
I ran into the Shechinah in an art museum. It was the Art Institute of Chicago. Maybe not the way it is now, but the way it was when I was a kid. She was in one of the Impressionist rooms. In front of Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of la Grande Jatte. (Audio Podcast.)
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