There are many profound gifts that flow from growing up with a parent who is a doctor. The fact that my father is an anesthesiologist helped me to feel safer as an asthmatic child. I knew that he helped people breath during operations at the hospital, and so I knew that he would help me breathe when my wheezing got louder and it began to…
It has always been about you. As billions of people around the world celebrate Passover and Easter this week, I am reminded that this Holiest of Weeks is all about you. Yes, to be sure, the main focus is on Jesus who came to live out his powerful message of love and in these final days to die and then, to rise. Yet everything that…
Last Monday, I used my day off to travel to New York City. As I walked up the stairs out of the subway and enjoyed my first glimpse of the New York skyline against the gray winter sky I was reminded of the old joke: One man stops another on the streets of New York and asks, “Excuse me, sir, how do you get to…
God made a promise to Abram thousands of years ago saying: “I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” (Genesis 12:2-3) The Creator of the…
While of course the Hebrew Bible is the central story of the Jewish people, the richness of our tradition and of our essence stems from the fact that we read it as a foundational text supporting a framework woven through with all of the other stories that we have written and discovered and learned and lived since our tradition tells us that God gave the…
Around this time next week many men will begin panicking because they haven’t made the time to go out and get something for their significant other. Valentine’s Day, that oh so wonderful day of love. Deep down inside we all still desire to be the object of someone’s affection. Who doesn’t remember getting that Valentine’s Day card in school? Most people, whether they would admit…
I’m getting married this spring. If you speak to my parents, my friends or my congregants, it’s about time. If you had asked me a few weeks ago, I would have said that it’s long past time. For years I have been serving the families of my community wondering if I will ever have a family of my own, and to be honest, I had…
Happy New Year! It will be happy for some, maybe, but not so much for others. In a recent article in Politico, Michael Grunwald exclaimed, “Everything is Awesome.” He said as much because according to his research “the U.S. economy grew at a 5 percent rate in the third quarter. The economy added 320,000 jobs in November, the best of 57 straight months of job…
There is a wonderful story in a collection of teachings by Rabbi Moshe Hayyim Efrayim (1748-1800). In this story, the rabbi describes a village musician of such prodigious talent that whenever he enters into the town square, picks up his instrument and begins to play, anyone within earshot is immediately inspired to dance with joy, jumping into the air and spinning exuberantly in the Hasidic…
Jesus was not white or black. If anything Jesus in his humanity was Hebrew. He was a Jewish man from Nazareth born in a manger in Bethlehem. God chose to take on human form thousands of years ago and one of the reasons was to begin to dismantle the prideful issue of racism. Yet today we see people rioting and looting and at the bottom…
There is an old story about two very competitive classmates at an Ivy League college. For four years they jockey with each other to see who can get better grades, lead more organizations and collect more invitations to various parties and societies. As often happens, even though so much of their college careers are defined by their relationship to each other, soon after graduation they…