I am walking around afraid. Not always afraid of something specific. My body is fueled by adrenaline and programmed by the epigenetics of generations of ancestors whose fear responses enabled their survival and mine. My soul has fluttered right out of my body. Is there any solid place where it can land?
Read moreDeath of Moses; the Exhale After (Audio Podcast)
At the end of Torah, Moshe dies, after much struggle and resistance. Torah seems to take a breath, a long exhale, as we roll back the scroll to the beginning. And so in our lives as well, the exhale after the long-anticipated death of anyone we love. The gasp, the exhale.
Read moreIsrael, Anatevka, and the Jewish Soul (Audio Podcast)
For Yom Kippur, I explore what it is in our American Jewish soul – the longing, the fear, and the insecurity – that keeps us silent when Israel (and Palestine) are under discussion. Now is the time to find our voice.
Read moreMade of Ancient Light (Audio Podcast)
The Lurianic story says that Creation came about through a shattering of light-filled vessels. The primordial light is embedded in all of us. And our bodies and our separateness are all a kind of mask over an ancient, light-filled Oneness. How can we use that mystical insight?
Climb Up and Look (Audio Podcast)
Moshe is denied entry to the Promised Land. But he is invited to climb the mountain and look to the horizon and see what no one else can.
Read moreAh, the Narrows (Audio Podcast)
We are in the narrows now. Is that such a bad thing?
A drash reconsidering the Beyn Hametzarim – the three narrow weeks leading to Tisha B'Av.
Jerusalem Day (Audio Podcast)
Yom Yerushalayim – Jerusalem Day – celebrates the reunification of the City. But it feels anything but unified. It can only be honored as a vision, but a vision in need of revision.
Read moreMother of Months (Audio Podcast)
The month ahead – the month of Nisan, which begins Wednesday night – is not only the first month of the Hebrew calendar, it also contains all the subsequent months within it as if in utero. It is the Shekhinah, the Divine Mother, birthing time. What do we want to birth in this next year?
Read moreThe Weight of Money (Audio Podcast)
Money is power. And the more money you have, the greater your power to do good and the greater your power to do evil. In the Purim story, the Queen Esther story, Haman uses arguments about Jewish disloyalty to convince the king to order the destruction of the Jews. But to clinch the deal, he offers to fund the operation himself. He offers 10,000 talents of silver for the king’s treasury if the king will issue the edict. Haman doesn’t just dream up the destruction of the Jews, Haman buys the destruction of the Jews. How are we ever to prevail against well-funded hate?
Read moreWhen the Earth Trembles (Audio Podcast)
Just as the memory of earthquakes is wired into our bodies, so the memory of earthquakes is wired into our mythologies. Our ancestors understood earthquakes to be the very Earth trembling in God’s presence, as we ourselves certainly would. God is the physics of the earthquake and more than the physics. God is also in our pained experience of the catastrophe.
Read moreSong of Refuge (Audio Podcast)
We name this not only Shabbat Shirah but Refugee Shabbat, to help us renew our compassion and empathy for the refugees who are right now lodging in tent cities and crossing great waters and wandering from place to place in search of home. We were refugees too. They are our story rewritten in the present tense.
Read moreFast with Me (What if the Egyptians Had?): Audio Podcast
What if at some point they had refused to go along with it anymore? What if they had declared a general strike? If they had gathered at the palace in protest? If they had decreed a day of fasting and crying out to their gods or to ours? Would it have made a difference to Pharaoh? Even if it didn’t, mightn’t it have made a difference to us? Introducing Interfaith Public Fast of Sonoma County
Read moreVayigash: Life Has Had Its Way (Audio Podcast)
For me, looking back over this year, what stands out most is how many individual stories in our community reached their conclusions. Looking at them, suddenly, everything shifts. A story of individual trauma and triumph gives way to a larger story of life pouring through the details of circumstance. Every act, every turn of the story, is imbued with a greater knowingness. Seeds have borne fruit. Life has had its way.
Read moreIn the Light of Justice: Teshuvah and Reparations (Audio Podcast)
There is an invitation for collective teshuvah in front of us at this moment of history, being proffered by too many modern-day prophets to count, and by too many to ignore, taking the form of the movement for reparations. This critical piece of teshuvah is an invitation for the collective to develop its moral conscience, to look at how old harms continue to live with us until they are addressed, to notice how we are implicated even in histories we didn’t actively participate in.
Read moreToward a Galactic Judaism (Audio Podcast)
Rosh Hashanah reminds us to think beyond the human scale of our lives, and get on Cosmic terms. Is our Judaism big enough to go galactic? And what does a Cosmic consciousness require of us in the here and now?
Read moreParashat Eikev: Reparations 101 (Audio Podcast)
Parashat Eikev offers another Jewish entry point to a consideration of reparations. “Beware,” Moshe says, “lest you come to think that your good fortune is of your own doing.”
Read moreThe Plain of Threading (Audio Podcast)
Shabbat Chazon 5782
Where evening becomes day, light alternates with leaf, and experience becomes story.
Featuring Min Hametzar – Psalm 118:5; Setting: Rabbi Shefa Gold.
Conditions for Prophecy (Audio Podcast)
Prophecy is not dead. But it does require the right conditions to emerge. What are the insights waiting to come from or through us? How can we make it easier to hear them?
Read moreThe Walls are Broken, But We Ain't Done Yet: Fasting as Community Protest (Audio) + New Niggun
Tisha B’Av, coming up in a few weeks, might be a cautionary tale. This is what destruction looks like. This is what it looks like when there’s nothing left to be done. But the 17th of Tammuz is a blueprint for possibility. “Do something now,” it seems to tell us. Fast. Plead. It’s not too late. It’s not over yet. A drash for 17 Tammuz.
Plus a new niggun, “Niggun in the Breach” performed by the Ner Shalom Good Shabbos Band – Suzanne Shanbaum, Sheridan Gold, and Irwin Keller.
Read more(Audio Podcast) A Nameless Angel and a Woman whose Name Might or Might Not Have Been Tzlelponit
story from the Book of Judges about an angel prophesying the miraculous birth of a child, and the unnamed woman who was to be Samson's mother. (AUDIO)
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