Synopsis
Bringing weekly Jewish insights into your life. Join Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz, Rabbi Michelle Robinson and Rav-Hazzan Aliza Berger of Temple Emanuel in Newton, MA as they share modern ancient wisdom.
Episodes
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Shabbat Sermon: Does Judaism Prize Finishing the Job? with Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz
06/05/2023 Duration: 16minIf you are a Boston sports fan, two words inspire pathos: Boston Bruins. This past regular season, the Bruins enjoyed not just a successful season, but a historically successful season. The National Hockey League, NHL, is 106 years old. In the long history of the league, this year’s Bruins set the record for most wins in a season. They set the record for most points in a season. Not only did they win lots of games; they usually trounced their opponent. The NHL keeps a record of what is called goal differential: by how many goals did the winning team beat the losing team. Boston’s goal differential ranks second in history. During the regular season the Bruins could not have been more dominant. Meanwhile, their opponents in the playoffs, the Florida Panthers, could not have been more mediocre. Literally an average team, actually below average. Out of 32 teams, the Panthers had the 17th best record. They just barely made the playoffs. When the series started, the Bruins took a commanding 3-1 lead in a
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Talmud Class: The Torah of Rabbi Harold Kushner, Zichrono Livrachah
06/05/2023 Duration: 43minWhen the history of twentieth-century Jewry is written, I believe that one of the most important, impactful, influential thinkers will be Rabbi Harold Kushner, who was laid to his eternal rest this past Monday. I do not know of a rabbi whose teaching had a broader reach or a bigger impact. It is not just that his books sold millions of copies. Not just that his books were translated into many languages. Not just that his work was read by Jews and non-Jews alike. Rabbi Harold Kushner did something else virtually miraculous: he talked about God in a way that landed for ordinary people who do not usually talk about God. What was his secret sauce? How did he make God real and relatable for millions of people, Jews and non-Jews alike? Now that he has passed, how can his Torah on God connect with you? May Rabbi Harold Kushner rest in peace. May his Torah deepen our relationship with God, with Torah, with mitzvah, and with the very special community we are blessed to have at Temple Emanuel.
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Rabbi Michelle Robinson and Jill Ebstein on "Alfred's Journey to be Liked"
02/05/2023 Duration: 40minJoin Rabbi Michelle Robinson and Jill Ebstein as they discuss Jill's book, "Alfred's Journey to be Liked". Find the book here!
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Shabbat Sermon: Palestine 1936 - The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict with Oren Kessler
22/04/2023 Duration: 29minJoin Oren Kessler as he discusses his book, Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict.
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Israel's 75th Anniversary Sermon: Two Questions That Heal with Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz
15/04/2023 Duration: 18minFor some reason--I don’t know why it happens, I just know that it happens--tensions seem to rise in a family before a big milestone or family simcha. People tend to argue. To bicker. To get into negative energy patterns. The classic example of weird negative energy preceding what should be a happy family time is a wedding. If you have ever planned a wedding, you know this. As the day draws near, anxiety rises. Lists proliferate. Who is going to go to Costco to get the bottled water and the small bags of Cape Cod potato chips? Who is going to the hotels to drop off the gifts baskets? We just had a Covid cancellation. We need to redo table 11. Simcha anxiety is such a well-known phenomenon that I tell every couple that I have ever worked with for their wedding to get out of the wedding business a week before their wedding—no more wedding details, no more wedding to do lists—so that they can spend that last week focusing on what matters: their love for one another. We the Jewish people are now having a
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Pesach Day 8 Sermon: The Quilt with Rav Hazzan Aliza Berger
13/04/2023 Duration: 13minWhen I was home for Thanksgiving this year, my mom and I were going through some old boxes at the bottom of a closet when we came across a bag of colorful fabrics. “What’s this?” I asked my mom. With a funny look on her face, my mom took the bag and started looking through it. “This is the quilt I was going to make you when you were a baby.” Apparently, when I was born, my mom didn’t want to just be a stay-at-home caretaker. She wanted to feel productive. To be able to show something beyond a growing baby for the time she was spending at home. Naturally, she decided to make a baby quilt. She went to the fabric store and picked out a book of quilt patterns, she bought fabric and washed it, and then every day, when she would put me down for a nap, she would go and work on that quilt. It all seemed to be going well until it came time to put the squares together. Then, somehow, they wouldn’t fit. At the time, my mom was so sleep-deprived that she couldn’t figure out how to make it work. She threw those
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Pesach Day 7 Sermon: The Things We Do For Love with Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz
12/04/2023 Duration: 15minFor those of you hearty enough to come to shul on the seventh day of Pesach, I want to share with you a love story—in fact a Pesach double love story. But to appreciate this double love story, we need first to talk about halakha, Jewish law. When was the last time that happened in a sermon? The Torah commands us to have no chametz in our possession during the holiday of Pesach. Chametz is defined as five species of grain: wheat, barley, spelt, rye, and oats. It is not just that we can’t eat chametz. It is also that we cannot have chametz, cannot own chametz. Our homes have to be chametz-free. Now we have all had the experience, when cleaning our house for Pesach, of finding in the back of the food pantry a stale box of crackers with the expiration date of February 2020. We happily dispose of the stale crackers grateful for the impetus Pesach gives us to do a deep cleaning of our kitchen once a year. But what do we do with all the chametz that is fresh, the fresh boxes of pasta and crackers? It would
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Pesach Day 2 Sermon: Stocking Boxes to Freedom with Rav Hazzan Aliza Berger
07/04/2023 Duration: 12minLhakpa Sherpa grew up impoverished in the shadow of Mount Everest. Her father worked as a shepherd and her mother raised her along with her ten siblings. They were dirt poor. So poor that they couldn’t afford to buy shoes for the children, let alone to send Lhakpa to school. Instead, she spent her days wandering barefoot through the mountains. Ever since she was little, Lhakpa has had one dream: she wanted to climb Mount Everest. At the time, women were not welcome to try. Every climber was male, every Sherpa porter was male, and even the thought of a woman trying to climb Mount Everest was enough to make experienced mountaineers laugh out loud. When Lhakpa was about 15, she started hanging around base camp and begging the Sherpa porters there to give her a chance. She spent two years pleading, begging, lobbying, and trying to persuade them before Babu Chhiri Sherpa, a legend in his own right who once spent a record-breaking 21 hours on the top of Mount Everest without oxygen, agreed to give her a cha
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Shabbat Sermon: The Keystone Habit We All Need Now with Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz
01/04/2023 Duration: 17minIsrael. The images of civil unrest playing out in Israel this past Monday are images we never thought we would see. Demonstrations of hundreds of thousands of Israelis; counter demonstrations; the airport closed; IDF soldiers and reservists and pilots refusing to serve; general strikes; universities closing; ambassadors resigning; a high government official, Yoav Gallant, fired for speaking his mind and asking for dialogue. All this happening just as Israel is about to celebrate its 75th anniversary. And all this happening just as we are about to sit down to our seders Wednesday and Thursday nights. How, if at all, do we talk about Israel at our seders?
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Talmud Class with Rachel Korazim: The Wadi Salib Riots of 1959
01/04/2023 Duration: 48min“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” - William Faulkner Faulkner’s famous quotation underlies all of Rachel Korazim’s sessions in this series about the crisis in Israel today. To understand the push for reform, and the protests against reform, we went back to the Altalena incident in 1948 (March 18 Talmud class) and to what Arabs in Israel have come to call their naqba, also 1948 (March 25 Talmud class). Rachel takes us to the Wadi Salib neighborhood of Haifa on July 9, 1959, when police shot and wounded a man named Yaakov Elkarif, as a result of which riots ensued. These riots were fueled by tensions between Ashkenazis and Mizrachis—all of which is brought to life by the poems we will consider tomorrow. The tensions today are in part fueled by unresolved tensions between Ashkenazis and Mizrachis. The past is never dead. It’s not even past. We here may not be able to solve the tensions at play on the streets of Israel today. But Rachel’s teaching will enable us to better understand them. Learning i
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Shabbat Sermon: Once Upon a Cruise Ship with Rav Hazzan Aliza Berger
25/03/2023 Duration: 18minHow can you make sure to have the most meaningful and impactful Passover? Is it about preparation? The extent to which you clean out every cabinet and kasher your kitchen? Is it about the Seder itself—the Haggadah you choose and the activities you plan for the Seder? In the spring of 2014, I was in my second year of rabbinical school and got a gig as a cruise-ship rabbi. Given that this was my first real gig as a rabbi, I was determined to create the most meaningful Passover experience ever. I researched for months leading up to Pesach and put together a folder of midrashim and teachings for every part of the Seder. Little did I know what the cruise had in store for me.....
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Talmud Class: Rachel Korazim on Naqba
25/03/2023 Duration: 48minTalk to any Israeli, talk to any American who has recently been to Israel, and the words one hears are: depressing, very concerning, unprecedented, I’m afraid. I don’t know how this ends. How did we get here? Where does this story begin? Last week, Rachel Korazim, our Israeli teacher of Israeli poetry, made a point that is so simple, so profound, and so important. The conflicts playing out in Israel did not just spontaneously happen in year 75. They have been cooking for 75 years. Their roots go back to the beginning of Israel’s existence. Last week she talked about how the Altalena conflict evinced deep conflicts among Jewish Israelis that continue to play out on the streets today. This week, Rachel is going to go back to 1948 again, to what Palestinians call the Naqba, as reflected in this poetry. There is no more urgent issue for American Jews than Israel. There is no better teacher on Israel than Rachel Korazim. Let’s learn together.
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Shabbat Sermon: Off Script with Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz
18/03/2023 Duration: 18minI am not proud of it, but one day while on a recent long flight, to make the time pass, I found myself reading a rom com, total beach reading. There were so many other worthier things I could have read. I could have read an analysis of the impasse on judicial reform in Israel. Or I could have done daf yomi, the study of a daily page of Talmud. Or with Passover coming up, I could have studied the Haggadah to get ready for the seders. But no, I read a rom com, light and breezy. I know it would be wrong to evade taking responsibility for this choice. I did it. I own it. I would never want to blame anyone else. I would never want to blame my wife Shira, for example. Even though Shira read it first and seemed to be thoroughly engaged while reading it. Even though Shira downloaded it on our family Kindle. Even though when I asked Shira for a recommendation, she pointed me to this book. Still reading the rom com is on me. The novel features a woman named Nora who writes love stories produced on The Roman
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Talmud Class: Poetry and Protest With Rachel Korazim
18/03/2023 Duration: 47minThe impasse over judicial reform in Israel continues to be concerning and unresolved. Protests continue. Conversations have not resulted in resolution. Positions are hardening. The compromise which President Herzog implored both sides to work towards remains elusive. Talk to Israelis—their morale is low. They are troubled. “We hope we get there”—to Israel’s 75th. This Shabbat we are blessed to have a familiar voice and dear friend offering us a genre that we have not yet encountered regarding the impasse: poetry. Rachel Korazim, born in 1948, has lived her life in Israel. She is an expert in Israeli poetry. Before the pandemic, she would teach at TE in person every year. Since the pandemic, she has continued to offer classes to TE members on Zoom. In fact, one of the classes she is offering remotely now concerns how poetry speaks to this moment. On Shabbat, through the magic of technology (thank you Brian Lefsky and David Beckman), Rachel Korazim, in Israel, joins our clergy team and in person learners
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Shabbat Sermon: Knitted Together Forever
11/03/2023 Duration: 17minI recently heard a podcast featuring Andy Stanley--have I mentioned him before? He is a pastor in Atlanta--and his wife Sandra, and they were discussing a most compelling question: How do we parent our children so that when they grow up and grow out, they want to spend time with their parents, and with one another, even when they don’t have to? If this is our goal, our parenting north star, that should motivate all our parenting decisions along the way.
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Talmud Class: Demoralized Israel - How Can We Help a Land we Love in a Troubled Time?
11/03/2023 Duration: 40minWhen I was in Jerusalem last week sitting shiva for our father, after folks gave their condolences and shared their memories, they would ask me for my take on Israel. The conversation was sobering, making me feel naïve and disconnected from the real Israel that is. Me: In Greater Jewish Boston, we are so excited to be marking Israel at 75. A big contingent from our shul is going to celebrate Israel at 75! A big contingent from the whole Boston Jewish community is going to mark this joyful and incredible milestone! How are you thinking about Israel at 75? Comforters: One of two responses. The less common: “Not on our radar screen at all. We’ve given it no thought till you just mentioned it.” By far the more common: “I hope we get there. Not clear that we will make it to 75 as one country.” In the shiva house, I had the sinking feeling that there was not one death I was mourning, but two. Something has died in Israel beyond our father – a belief of Israelis
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Talmud Class: Hero or Villain -how should we see Mordechai?
04/03/2023 Duration: 41minAs a child, I reveled in the heroism of Mordechai. I admired him for his gumption, for the way he stood up to Haman and never betrayed his values--even when his very life was at stake. I was taught to see Mordechai as a capable and wise civil servant, as a mensch who took in his orphaned niece and loved her like his own, and as a visionary who empowered the people around him, most especially his niece, Esther. But the story of Mordechai is more complicated than that of a simple hero. Tomorrow, we're going to interrogate the narrative that so many of us were taught: Was Mordechai a true hero who lifted up good Jewish values every minute of his life? Or was Mordechai a self-centered politician who was so focused on his own image that he risked the safety and well-being of the Jewish people in order to prove his dedication to Judaism? Was Mordechai a benevolent and loving uncle? Or was he a manipulative abuser, forcing Esther to conform to his will and serve his purposes? Is the point of Purim to celebrate heroi