From The Bimah: Jewish Lessons For Life

"Something like a plague has appeared upon my house." Leviticus 14:35. With these words, the troubled homeowner in ancient Israel gives voice to a truth that is universal. Homes, like human beings, are living things. Organic. Alive. Just like a human being can have healthy or not healthy practices, so too a home, and our home life, can have healthy or not healthy practices. Just like a human being can change it up and become more healthy, so too a home life can get better. Just like a human being can be overcome by illness and leave the world, some homes cannot survive their painful dysfunction. All of these truths are in our portion this week, parshat metzora. When the Talmud encountered the case of the leprous house, it insisted that we not take these passages literally. That we interpret the leprous house as a metaphor and ask: what are the forces that strengthen home life? What are the forces that undermine home life? Can a bad home life be made good? Is that even possib

It was the slap, and the rant, heard around the world. How many of you saw Will Smith strike Chris Rock, and then rant about it,  in real time? How many of you read about it, or saw a clip of it, after the Academy Awards? It was of course raw and shocking, unscripted drama that was by far the most dramatic thing that happened all evening. If it were just a celebrity thing, a famous actor slapping the face of a famous comedian, it would just be another moment of sensationalist news. But it’s not just a celebrity thing, it is very much a human thing. Because most of us, in our own quiet way, have been tempted to do our own version of what Will Smith did that night. Something ticked us off. Something got our blood boiling. Our temper went from zero to 100 in a nano second. And we were tempted to lose it. To give the other person a piece of our mind. And yet, when we lose self-control, we lose control.

Last Shabbat had a special name, Shabbat Parah, the Sabbath of the Cow. It is one of the special Shabbatot that tells us that Passover is coming. What does the Red Heifer of Numbers 19 have to do with Passover? This text is famously opaque. A red heifer, hyssop, scarlet, and cedar are burned up, their ashes mixed with pure water, and that solution has the power to purify somebody who has become impure by reason of contact with the dead when the solution is applied to them on days 3 and 7 after contact with the dead. Scholars have puzzled over this passage for thousands of years. They have come up with lots of explanations--which means no one explanation that compels and satisfies. Until two years ago. In the attached essay, written in 2020, before his last Pesach, in the shadow of his own advancing cancer, Rabbi Jonathan Sachs does something very rare in the world of Torah scholarship: an utterly new idea. When you read his essay, it is clear that he nails it. What he has to say is mo

In 1986, Professor Ray Scheindlin of the Jewish Theological Seminary authored a book with an evocative title: Wine, Women, & Death: Medieval Hebrew Poems on the Good Life.  The book featured the poetry of Jewish poets who lived during the Golden Age of Jewish Spain.  They lived the good life, with rich homes with gardens and pools and fountains. They wrote poetry about their good life, about their gardens and pools and fountains.  Most of these poets were secular.   And they were rooted in Judaism. At home in Spain. At home in Judaism. The Golden Age. But something happened to the Golden Age. It ended.

There is a rare cantillation mark called the shalshelet that occurs only four times in the entire Torah. The shalshelet goes up and down and is conspicuously drawn out, to evoke a deep hesitation. In Genesis 19:16, Lot hesitates before leaving Sodom with his family. He knows it is marked for destruction, but he is stuck. More than we know what we like, we like what we know. Sodom wasn’t perfect, but he hesitated leaving it. In Genesis 24:12, Abraham’s servant Eliezer hesitates before praying to God to help send an appropriate partner for Isaac. In Genesis 39:8, Joseph hesitates before refusing the advances of Potiphar’s wife, who tries to seduce him. In last Shabbat’s reading, in Leviticus 8:23, Moses hesitates before slaughtering the sacrificial animal that would ordain Aaron and his sons as the priests. In each case, the protagonist wrestles with an inner demon before doing the right thing. Angst, self-doubt, indecision precede deed. What do we learn from the shalshelet, and the wrestlin

Leadership under fire. President Volodymyr Zelensky and Regional Governor Vitaliy Kim are both inspiring the world with their peerless leadership under the fire of this war. The Times article about the death and dying in the port city of Mykolaiv, shelled every day by Russian forces, provides the context for Governor Kim’s nightly inspiring addresses. President Zelensky this week talked from the heart to the heart of Canadians and Americans in ways that inspire universal admiration. In the spirit of the oncoming holiday of Passover, here are four questions about leadership under fire.  One: what is the key ingredient to this leadership under fire? Is it the fire that creates the leadership that lands so dramatically? Or is it not about the historic context but the personalities of these two leaders?  Two: do we in America have charismatic leaders like President Zelensky and Governor Kim? Why or why not?  Three: how does their model of charismatic leadership under fire compare with our classic T

March 12, 2022

The eyes of the world are on Ukraine. Day after day for two weeks now and counting. How can the relentless shelling of civilian targets continue day after day, captured on all our screens in real time, and it keeps happening? What can the United States do about it?  What should the the United States do about it? Will the extreme sanction regime work? How does it end? What does it portend? Our Brotherhood had arranged to have our elected Representative, Jake Auchincloss, himself a marine who had served in Afghanistan, talk about his journey from the battlefield to Congress. But in light of the urgent international crisis in Ukraine, Representative Auchincloss will instead be talking about the issue on all of our minds: Ukraine. What a gift to have a new voice, and true wisdom, on this deep tragedy unfolding before our very eyes every day. May what we learn from Representative Auchincloss help us help.

March 5, 2022

Ever since the war started in Ukraine, I’ve been feeling things that don’t make sense. The space over my heart feels achy, almost bruised. My breathing is shallow, like the air around me is thick with worry and the oxygen can’t get through. My heart races and then goes quiet and then races again.  I’m desperate for information, doom-scrolling at all hours, reading every newspaper article I can find, as if my survival depends on what I learn. On a logical level, I know what I am feeling is not real. I live in Boston, thousands of miles from this war. I am safe. And yet, I can’t shake the feeling that this is how it starts, nor can I free myself from the inherited memory of how it ends.

Barbara Gaffin and Betsy Hecker spoke to our congregation about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Both have worked on the partnership between the Boston Jewish community, Combined Jewish Philanthropies, and the Ukrainian Jewish community for many years. They addressed the question on all of our minds: what can I do? How can I help? We are praying for peace every morning and every evening. May our prayers for peace inspire our deeds that help real people in Ukraine now.   What can we do now? Click below to find out!   https://www.templeemanuel.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/How-to-Help-Ukraine.pdf

February 26, 2022

How are we to understand the many stories we have all read about anger run amok in public places; about bad behavior on airplanes, at restaurants, at the bridges that connect Canada and the US blocked by angry Canadian truck drivers? This anger victimizes innocent people, the passengers and flight attendants on the plane, the waiters and fellow diners at the restaurant, drivers trying to cross the bridge who are stuck in traffic for hours on end.

February 19, 2022

Last shabbos, we gathered in the sanctuary to process the rising threat of antisemitism in our world. Officially, we were talking about the recently released report by Amnesty International which condemned Israel in very intense ways. In clearly antisemitic ways.  But we were also thinking about Colleyville, about swastikas carved into gym mats and painted on bathroom stalls here in Newton public schools. We were also thinking about the rise in hate crimes perpetrated against Jews, and about the increasingly vitriolic rhetoric against Israel worldwide.  We talked about strategies, about how we might fight these forces. Underlying our conversation, though, was a deep undercurrent of pain. How is it that even after the Holocaust, how is it the world does not see our plight? How is it the world does not see us? Does not see our context, does not see our story? How are we so invisible?

February 12, 2022

February 5, 2022

Robert Leikind, the Regional Director of AJC New England, brought us a special sermon on a recent Amnesty International report and and shared what we, individually, and we as a community, can do to support our beloved Eretz Yisrael.

January 29, 2022

January 29, 2022