From The Bimah: Jewish Lessons For Life

Erin Alexander sat crying in her car in the Target parking lot. Her beloved sister-in-love had just passed away suddenly, and she was overwhelmed with grief. When the worst of it had passed, she wiped away her tears and decided to stop by Starbucks to get some green tea before attempting to complete her errand. As soon as she opened the Starbucks door, she could tell the barista was not having a good day. She kept explaining to customers that the espresso machine was broken and was trying her best to accommodate their caffeine requirements with workarounds, but was clearly stressed and struggling to keep up. When it was her turn in line, Erin smiled as brightly as she could and told the barista to “hang in there.” A few minutes later, when she picked up her iced green tea, she was surprised to see a message scrawled on the side of the cup. “Erin,” it read, “your soul is golden.” That barista didn’t know her sister-in-love had died, she didn’t know how rough it had been to get through every day or the strength

In October 1973, singer and songwriter Leonard Cohen was hating his life. He struggled with depression.  He struggled with drugs like acid and LSD. He had had a child with a woman to whom he was not married, and he struggled with monogamy.  His creativity was stymied. He couldn’t write. He couldn’t find joy in performing.  At 39 he felt he was past his prime, that he should retire. In his own words, that he should “shut up.” As Leonard Cohen was in the throes of his mid-life crisis, Israel was attacked on Yom Kippur, October 6, 1973. Israel was unprepared for this war. The initial weeks were brutal. Israel’s air force, so dominant six years earlier, was dramatically undermined by new Russian anti-aircraft missiles. Israeli ground troops suffered horrendous casualties. These two stories—Leonard Cohen’s personal crisis, and Israel’s national crisis—came together because somehow, in the midst of the war, Leonard Cohen decided to go to Israel. The day he arrived, he went to a Tel Aviv café to ponde

September 24, 2022

This summer Shira and I tried a new move. We started riding e-bikes. An e-bike is like a regular bike, with a seat, handlebars, two wheels, shifting gears. You pedal, and the bike moves. There is only one difference. The e in e-bike is for electricity. There are three settings, and you can give your bike a jolt of a little electricity, a moderate amount, or a whole lot of electricity when the going gets tough. All summer, I felt vaguely like this was not kosher. This was not authentic. A real cyclist would eschew an e-bike. I particularly felt this pang of inauthenticity while going uphill because the steeper the hill, the more electricity I summoned, with the result that it kind of felt like I was Lance Armstrong, climbing the steepest hills with ease, while all the while I knew it was the electricity, it was not me. It felt off, but I couldn’t place why it felt off—until this week. This week I was listening to the Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast. Andy Stanley, as I have shared before, is in my view the grea

For my money, the best, simplest, shortest expression of the complexity of Israel remains the opening chapter of Ari Shavit’s classic My Promised Land.  Shavit’s grandfather was among the first Zionists who settled Eretz Yisrael. Shavit himself served in the Israeli army as a paratrooper. The book opens: “For as long as I can remember, I remember fear. Existential fear.” Two pages later: “For as long as I can remember, I remember occupation. Only a week after I asked my father whether the Arab nations were going to conquer Israel, Israel conquered the Arab-populated regions of the West Bank and Gaza.” How do we, and our children and grandchildren, respond to this complexity? One response is, it’s exhausting. We have enough problems here in America. Disconnection. Another response is indictment. Using words like Apartheid. Hostility. That is where a lot of American Jews (especially young American Jews) are, somewhere between disconnected and hostile. Tomorrow we are going to consider a model of wisdom fro

September 10, 2022

We bring two great thinkers to one of the Jewish people’s biggest challenges and opportunities: reclaiming Zionism. Danny Gordis’ excellent and thoughtful piece shows how, shockingly, Zionism has become a dirty word among certain segments of the American Jewish community. There are American synagogues today who are ideologically opposed to Zionism. There are rabbinical students today who are neutral or negative on Zionism. How is it possible that Zionism, which gave birth to the Jewish state, is a source of negative energy among some American Jews? Please read or reread Danny’s piece. What is his diagnosis, what is his prescription, and do you agree with him? Our second thinker is Yehuda Kurtzer. We will examine the sources and how he framed them in his lecture called The Zionist Idea delivered at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem this past summer. While Yehuda does not mention Danny Gordis or the issue of anti-Zionism, his lecture and his sources are an incredibly p

What is true for our Torah portion this morning is also true for every human being who has ever lived, including all of us here today. Also true for our country. What we all have in common is complexity: our Torah, our nation, each of us, contains multitudes. Charlie spoke with a wisdom beyond his years about the complexity in our parsha. The same parsha which begins with “Justice, justice shall you pursue” also commands genocide in God’s name. Also commands, in God’s name, “You may take as your booty the women, the children, the livestock, and everything in the town—all its spoil—and enjoy the use of the spoil of your enemy, which the Lord your God gives you.” We wrestle with Charlie’s question, how can the same portion that is emphatically concerned about justice in Deuteronomy 16 also command what we now know to be war crimes in Deuteronomy 20? The Torah contains multitudes. But isn’t that true for us all?  We can be generous and ungenerous, forgiving and unforgiving, gentle and cruel. We can be prese

In 1961, Sandy Greenberg was wallowing in despair. Up until that moment, his life had been full of promise. He was brilliant, musical, and athletic. In high school, he was elected president of the student council and of his senior class, upon graduation, he won a full scholarship to Columbia University in New York and was pursuing his dreams of becoming a lawyer. He had close friends and was dating the love of his life, whom he had met in the 6th grade. But in 1961, Sandy felt like all the promise of his life had abandoned him. For years, ophthalmologists had failed to diagnose his vision challenges correctly, resulting in a botched treatment that hastened the deterioration of his remaining vision and forced doctors to perform a surgery which ironically saved his eyeballs while destroying what remained of his sight. Sandy was deeply depressed. He left college, moved back home to Buffalo, gave up on his dreams of becoming a lawyer, and had resigned himself to being a burden on his family for the rest of his li

Serena Williams.  Everyone, even the most sports illiterate, knows Serena Williams.  Ever since she hit the professional stage in 1996, she has dazzled the world with her strength, skill, determination, and success.  She won her first Grand Slam at 17, spent 319 weeks—more than 6 years—ranked as the No. 1 player in the world by the Women’s Tennis Association, has held all four Grand Slam titles at the same time twice, and has won more matches than all but 4 women in the history of tennis—and achieved that even though she would often turn down matches for which she qualified so she could focus on Grand Slams. For me and so many other women, Serena has been not only a great tennis player, but also a very personal she-ro.  As a young woman, I remember watching her, thinking about how amazing it was that she wasn’t afraid to be strong.  She wore clothes that highlighted her muscles, that made her look like a superhero, and avoided outfits designed to be sexy.  She was aggressive on t

August 13, 2022

I have a confession to make. Many of you know that I love fishing—a passion I discovered after I met Solomon. But I haven’t been completely truthful. Because, you see, it’s not just that I love fishing, I particularly love beating Solomon at fishing. Ever since our first fishing trip together, I have always managed to catch more fish and better fish than Solomon. From the beginning, Solomon joked that I had an advantage—that the fish were drawn to a spiritual connection. Every time we would go, Solomon would laugh and tell the crusty old boat hands about his wife, the rabbi, who catches more fish and better fish even though she has only been fishing now for a couple of seasons. But all that changed on our recent trip to Canada. We went out cod fishing out of Lunenberg, Nova Scotia. As usual, we joked about how long it would take me to catch my first fish. But when we sunk those lines into the water, I was in for a surprise. Unlike every other fishing trip, my line was quiet and still. But Solomon was catching

July 30, 2022

Dr. John Fryer was a man of uncommon brilliance.  As a child, he learned so quickly and completely that his teachers called him a prodigy.  He was just five years old when he started second grade, 15 when he graduated from high school, and 19 when he graduated college and enrolled at Vanderbilt University Medical School where he became one of the youngest students ever to study psychiatry.  He graduated in 1962. Dr. John Fryer was also gay.  Back then, homophobia was codified and enshrined by the medical world and criminalized by law, a legally sanctioned form of hate. It was legal to fire someone or refuse to rent to someone based on their sexual orientation.  It was even legal to arrest someone simply for the “crime” of holding a lover’s hand or for being served alcohol at a gay bar.  Fryer was taunted on the playground and in the classroom, and even in medical school, he found no reprieve.  The foundational diagnostic text used by all psychiatrists, the Diagnostic and Sta

Rabbi David Wolpe tells the story of the time that Ralph Waldo Emerson went to church one Sunday morning and was displeased with the minister’s sermon. The minister revealed nothing of his own life story, Emerson complained.  He just talked about ideas and texts. Tell me how your life experience connects with my life experience connects with our life experience. In that spirit, I want to talk about the fact that two weeks ago, on July 3, Shira and I were in Italy for the wedding of our son Nat to his husband Davide. I share this with you not just to talk about the wedding, which was joyful and beautiful, but for a way in which a struggle I had on that day might connect with your own version of a similar struggle. What do I mean?

July 9, 2022

Chaplain, Colonel Larry Bazer shares some special experiences of serving as a full-time National Guard Chaplain in light of Parshat Korah and our nation’s 246th birthday, as well as personal insights regarding the last few challenging years for our country, as he oversaw the National Guard's religious response during the pandemic and the tumult of these last few years.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court struck down a New York law which required citizens to demonstrate “proper cause” to carry a firearm in public.  Yesterday the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade.  Next week, the Court will hear West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency and will almost certainly strike down the right of the EPA enact rules to limit greenhouse gas emissions and to fight climate change. Whatever your political affiliation, whomever you voted for in these past elections, we should all be concerned about these decisions.

Do you know what the word dox means—d-o-x? I had never heard of the word before this week. I learned its meaning as our community has encountered something you might have heard of, a website called The Mapping Project of BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanction) Boston. The dictionary definition of dox is to publish private or identifying information about a person or organization on the internet with malicious intent. BDS Boston engages in a massive doxing of both Jewish institutions and individuals, including many who are members of our own community. It lists names and addresses of institutions and individuals, while the people responsible for this website refuse to identify themselves. BDS Boston is ostensibly about Israel and Palestinians. But in fact it does not discuss Israel. Does not discuss Palestinians.  BDS Boston is about us, the Jews of Boston. They are not after Israel. They are after us. Cloaking themselves in anonymity, they pursue a double agenda.

This past week in the holy city of Boston, a miracle happened not once but twice. On Tuesday and Wednesday nights, Paul McCartney, who is eleven days shy of 80 years old, rocked on at Fenway Park. Fenway was jammed to the rafters, and this 80-year old singer wowed and captivated a full park for two and a half hours. Thirty songs. Did I mention that he is 80? How does an 80-year-old still have the energy, the charisma, the voice to hold that big of an audience for that long? How does a performer continue to perform the same songs that he has been singing, some of them Beatles classics like Can’t Buy Me Love, Hey Jude and Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da for 60 years, with fresh energy? Can you do that? Can you do the same thing for 60 years, with fresh energy? Could I give the same sermon for 60 years, with fresh energy? Could you hear my same sermon for 60 years, with fresh energy? How does he do that?