From The Bimah: Jewish Lessons For Life

A woman in Israel approached her rabbi with the following dilemma. When she was a younger woman, she was not religious. She had relations with a man and got pregnant. She had an abortion. She then became religious. She did teshuvah, repentance. She committed herself to learning Torah, doing mitzvot and joining an observant community. She moved to a new town, where she was not known, met a young yeshiva student who did not know about her past. She did not tell him. They got married. She got pregnant and delivered a healthy baby boy. Her husband wanted them to do a special ritual ceremony called pidyon haben, redemption of the first born, where they thank God for the gift of their first-born. Under Jewish law, however, the family could not do this ceremony because of her prior abortion, which the husband did not know about. So this wife and new mother approaches her local rabbi to ask: Should she now tell her husband about her past, that she had had an abortion, and that this baby was not eligible for this ritu

Sara Labaton, the Director of Teaching and Learning at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, recently taught a group of local rabbis. She observed that the prophetic ideals of peace (lion lies down the with lamb, nations will beat swords into ploughshares, neither will they know war anymore) are so lofty as to be unattainable. Would we be better off looking towards rabbinic ideals of peace?The good news for rabbinic ideals of peace: not lofty. Not utopian.The bad news: rabbinic ideals of peace are small, local, and very imperfect.On Shabbat we will consider a fascinating source about a most imperfect, indeed troubling peace. Three things about this source are striking.One the genre. It is sheilah u’teshuva, a legal question and answer, a responsum. Not a genre we have studied before.Two, the author is Ovadia Yosef, zichrono livracha, who was the Orthodox Chief Rabbi of the Sephardi community in Israel and throughout the world. He was incredibly learned and inspired passionate devotion among his follo

God is always confusing. We never know what to think. But that is especially true now in this fraught theological season between commemorating the Shoah (April 24), honoring soldiers who fell in Israel’s wars and victims of terrorism on Yom Hazikaron (April 30), and celebrating the birth of the State of Israel on om Ha’atzmaut (May 1). Tomorrow we are going to study a modern Jewish philosopher that we have never before studied, Rabbi Irving Greenberg, who came up with a new scheme: the Three Eras of Jewish History.It is new. It is thoughtful. It is engaging. It gives us what to talk about.But does it work? After all, the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel happened within three years of one another, very much in the same era.We will also look at the special insertions in our Amidah for Yom Hashoah and Yom Ha’atzmaut to see what statement they make on God’s relationship to the Jewish people and to history in 1941-45 and in 1948. We will also examine an important text from the Talmud that shows ou

Led by Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz

What happens when we lose our loved ones before we lose them? This happens to so many of our families. Our loved one experiences a slow decline, cognitively, or physically, that takes place over years that feels like forever. The decline crowds out earlier chapters.Our mother has not been herself for so long I can’t even remember what she used to be like.It’s been so long since my father was who he really was, I can’t remember him before his dementia set in.What do we do with this pain when we lose our loved ones before we lose them?We are about to say Yizkor. Yizkor offers us a poignant way to flip the script.It is true that we sometimes lose our loved ones before we lose them. But because of Yizkor, it is also true that after we lose our loved ones, we still have them.

In 1987 Oprah Winfrey read a book that changed her life. What happened to her as a result of reading that book, the unanticipated lesson she learned, remains fresh and urgent for her 38 years later.The book, by author Toni Morrison, was a novel called Beloved in which Morrison attempts to show what it was like to be a slave. What did slavery do to the enslaved person’s inner life, to their psyche, to their soul? How did slavery shape not only the enslaved person, but also their descendants—even when slavery was over?When Oprah Winfrey first read the novel, she fell in love with it. She just knew that she had to make a movie based on this book. Toni Morrison had never allowed any of her novels to be made into a film, but the author succumbed to the charms and persuasive powers of Oprah Winfrey.Oprah worked on the film Beloved for more than ten years. She herself played the lead. She used her power and influence to get the film made. The film was 3 hours long, was intense, hard, and sad—and did not have a happy

Powerful leaders who lie are as old as the Bible. Our Haftarah tomorrow, King David’s song of gratitude to God (2 Samuel 22:1-51), contains a big fat lie—a lie so obvious, so brazen, that one wonders how he had the temerity to utter it. King David says of himself:The Lord rewarded me according to my merit,He requited the cleanness of my hands.For I have kept the ways of the LordAnd have not been guilty before my God;I am mindful of all His rulesAnd have not departed from His laws.I have been blameless before Him,And I have guarded myself against sinning—And the Lord has requited my merit,According to my purity in His sight.We know all these words are blatantly, outrageously false. King David committed adultery with Batsheba. He committed murder, having her honorable and courageous husband Uriah put on the front lines so that Uriah would be killed in battle. King David violated Uriah’s trust, having Uriah carry the executive order of the King to the general demanding that Uriah be put in the most dangerous spo

How is this Passover different from all other Passovers? How is the seder we are doing tonight different from all the other seders we have ever done? Let me share a recent conversation I had with a good friend.We have a beloved member of our shul whose mother was born in Londorf, Germany. She was taken with all the other Jews of Londorf to Auschwitz. She was the only survivor from her town. Every other Jew of Londorf perished in Auschwitz. But his mother would go on to survive and thrive, to live a beautiful, joyful life and to build a family with generations of love. Auschwitz was liberated on January 27, 1945. Which meant that this past January 27, 2025 marked the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. He and his wife went to Auschwitz-Birkenau for the occasion, where they recited Kaddish for all those who perished. And it turns out that that very day was also his own mother’s yahrtzeit. Their words of Kaddish were filled with multiple meanings.I was talking to him about the unreal intensity of th

In 1992 Rabbi Joseph Telushkin published a book entitled Jewish Humor: What the Best Jewish Jokes Say About Jews. While he dedicated the book to his three daughters, the first chapter is about how hard it is for generations in a Jewish family to understand one another; how easy it is for frictions and misunderstandings to grow. Chapter one is entitled “Oedipus, Shmedipus, as Long as He Loves His Mother.” This is the first joke in his book.Three elderly Jewish women are seated on a bench in Miami Beach, each one bragging about how devoted her son is to her. The first one says: “My son is so devoted that last year for my birthday he gave me an all-expense paid cruise around the world. First class.”The second one says: “My son is more devoted. For my 75th birthday last year, he catered an affair for me. And even gave me money to fly down my good friends from New York.The third one says: My son is the most devoted. Three times a week he goes to a psychiatrist. Hundreds of dollars an hour he pays him. And what doe

Can one person change the world?That is the question at the end of the tractate Sanhedrin. The word "Sanhedrin" means the supreme judicial, civic, legal, religious authority in ancient Israel. The Talmudic tractate Sanhedrin is about justice-the human beings, institutions, procedures and protocols, evidentiary rules, safeguards, that enable human beings to create and sustain a just society.Because justice in this world is so elusive, Sanhedrin's final chapter deals with other-worldly matters of the world to come (olam ha'ba) and the resurrection of the dead (techiyat hameitim). If we do not get justice in this world, perhaps we might get it in the next. Impossible to prove or disprove concepts like the world to come and resurrection of the dead might be a consolation for those living in a current reality that is, as Thomas Hobbes put it, "nasty, brutish and short."Justice is so urgent. Justice is so hard. Sometimes we fail. Which leads to the last question of this tractate: Can one

This week, I was speaking with a member who has been struggling with an intense family situation and was heading into a tense and painful meeting. She was riding in a Lyft. The driver was playing Christian radio quietly in the front. A few minutes before they arrived at their destination, she heard something on the radio that piqued her interest. "Can you turn that up?" she asked. The hosts of the Christian radio show were discussing a verse from the book of Joshua where God says to Joshua, "I will be with you as I was with Moses. I will not fail you and I will not forsake you." Just then, the car stopped at her destination.She shared that as she was riding in the Lyft, she was feeling deeply afraid and alone. Hearing that verse gave her strength. As she put it, “how freaking amazing to get that message from Christian radio of all places in the exact moment I needed it….[and] of all the verses they could possibly be discussing, they are not only discussing verses from my part of the Bible

Shall we invite the troubling headlines—from Israel, Gaza, America, our world—to our seders? Are our seders supposed to be a joyful way to avoid the world (family, friends, songs, children’s skits, plays, games, great food, lots of wine, tasty desserts), or an invitation to engage the world and think out loud together about how we can make it better?Are there any great options? Three options present themselves:Festival of worry. If everyone around the seder table agrees, and we talk about it, what ensues is a lot of worry, angst, negative energy, along with resolving to do our part to protest the troubling turn of events.Festival of acrimony. If people around the seder table do not agree, and we talk about it, what ensues is conflict, friction, acrimony. Who needs it?Festival of willed indifference. We do at the seder what we do most days, live our lives like it is not happening. Ignore the elephant. Talk about something else. But is that what we should be doing at a seder whose purpose is to inspire us to do

In the Torah God tells us that from time to time God will hide God’s face. This would seem to be such a time. How do we find God in our troubled world together?

A woman named Jessica Sklar, her husband and their two children were happily living their lives in Pacific Palisades when their house burned down. Since losing all their earthly possessions, they have been wandering in the wilderness. In less than two months, this family has moved five times, from A B & B X5. In the home they used to love, they had stability and serenity. In the wilderness they now inhabit, they have anxiety and uncertainty. A deep question lodges in their soul: We are not okay. Will we ever be okay again? In the face of this anxiety and uncertainty, one place has brought them deep comfort: the Pacific Palisades Youth Baseball League which, because the Palisades fields were destroyed by the fire, are in neighboring towns. A Times article recently reported: At last came the siren call: Play ball! The pomp and circumstance…provided a modicum of normalcy for families who in the previous 53 days have had to find new homes, schools, doctors, cars, clothes, places to worship and more—al

How are we to understand the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil and the stated intent of the federal government to deport him?It is good. He is an Israel hater. Finally the federal government is cracking down on Israel hate and Jew hate that have been running rampant on college campuses, leading to the intimidation and harassment of Jewish students and supporters of Israel. Columbia has been the capital of Jew hate and Israel hate. It is about time.It is bad. It changes the fundamental character of our country if somebody can be arrested and possibly deported for expressing opinions, however distasteful they may be to some. Deporting somebody for the exercise of free speech means we are in scary times in a scary country. Though some in the pro-Israel community may cheer this development, how can we be sure that we are not next? See Pastor Marin Niemoller’s iconic words about Nazi Germany:First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.Then they came for the trade unionists, and

Robert Housman established Yad Chessed so he could help his neighbors struggling in Boston’s Jewish community. In the early years, he ran it by himself, with help from his wife Sue, as he worked full-time as a computer programmer. He directed Yad Chessed until the summer of 2012 when he became a member of its Board of Directors.

On Yom Kippur, October 9, 1943, in the middle of the Holocaust, Rabbi Walter Wurzburger gave a sermon at Congregation Chai Odom in Brighton, Massachusetts entitled “The Individual in the Crisis.” He argued that Jews in Greater Boston own moral responsibility for the Holocaust. On the basis of the High Priest’s avodah service, Rabbi Wurzburger offered this stark challenge:We behold a world of agony, misery, cruelty, injustice, brutality, and tyranny. We are responsible for it. It is our world. No complaints! No excuses! No defense mechanisms! No passing of the buck. (quoting the High Priest) “I and my family, we sinned, we failed, we are guilty, we are responsible.”If this be our lens, we cannot just lament and decry the pain of our world. We own the pain. We own the moral responsibility for doing something to fix it.That feels like a tall order. What can we do, here or in Israel? Maybe we should just focus on our dalet amot, the four cubits of our own existence. We cannot control what goes on in Washington or

In 1992, then 25-year-old Sinéad O'Connor appeared on Saturday Night Live. She was a budding international musical superstar with two chart-topping records to her name. And, unbeknownst to producers, she had decided to use her platform to protest rampant child abuse in the Catholic Church. At the end of her performance, she stared straight into the camera, tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II and threw it at the camera as she shouted, “fight the real enemy.”Now remember, 1992 was almost a decade before the sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church would come to light in this country. Not only were most Americans unaware of the evils that had unfolded behind closed doors, but they were also outraged that a pop star would dare to dishonor and defame a venerated religious leader. Sinéad was immediately and very publicly scorned, mocked, and ridiculed.Two weeks later, she was scheduled to perform at a special Madison Square Garden concert. Country music star Kris Kristofferson introduced her by sayin

Often music reflects the mood of the time we are in. That is the case with Megillat Esther – but in a surprising way. While we are chanting in a joyous musical mode, reflected in the trope of Purim, we suddenly hear two mournful tunes at several points during the Megillah reading. There are six verses that we sing to this mournful trope, the trope for Eicha, the book of Lamentations, which we read on Tisha B’Av. What does Purim, our happiest holiday, have to do with Tisha B’Av, our saddest?Join us on Shabbat morning as we examine different times during the Jewish year where there is a juxtaposition between joy and sorrow. How do we hold both at the same time?

Has this ever happened to you? One frigid morning, I grab my warmest jacket. I reach down to zip the zipper and it won’t budge. I pull. I push. I take it apart. I put it back. I pull again. I’m late. I’m from California – I need this coat to zip. Now there are probably more rational things to have done, but I do not do them. I pull with all my strength – words that I make it a practice not to say bubbling up in my mind – until I have whipped myself into a quiet frenzy. The coat is broken. The world is broken. It’s all too much.From broken zipper to broken world in 60 seconds flat. As the feeling moved from my kishkes to my head and calm descended, I thought of the many members who have shared how close to the surface that feeling of overwhelm is for so many right now in this moment of shifting ground. Our assumptions of what is usual or expected, in everything from the political to the tech to the economic to the global – whether you think those changes are good or not good – have been so rapidly changing tha