Rabbi’s Remarks from our Congregation Annual Meeting
Dear Friends, What follows are the remarks I delivered at this year’s Congregational Annual Meeting, reflecting back on an incredible year of contributions from, and on behalf of, Jewish community in general, and this community in particular. Thank you. What a year it has been. I began my time as Rabbi of Society Hill Synagogue […]
Balancing Compassion and Critique: A Yom Kippur Perspective on Israel
Dear Friends, I’m sometimes reminded of the adage about Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, that it has the capacity to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. That is, some of us go through life and are so hard on ourselves; day in, day out we find ourselves filled with self-recrimination and regret, focusing […]
The Jewish Story
Dear Friends, I wanted to share just briefly a bit about the mentality I’m holding each week when I write about Israel, Gaza, and the Middle East. I’m Jewish. I’m not breaking any news here when I say that, but I wanted to explicitly name that as part of the frame of reference from which […]
Making Sense of the World
What follows is the D’var Torah I delivered this past Shabbat on how theology can sometimes help us make sense of the world: Are you there, God? It’s me, Nathan Kamesar. One of the questions I ask week after week, and really moment after moment is, where is God in this? Where is […]
Identity, Israel, and Shared Humanity
Dear Friends, Each week I reflect, professionally, on a couple of fronts: for Friday nights, I try to write in a spirit that reflects the spirit of Shabbat—a poetic sensibility angled towards Shabbat as a palace in time, a foretaste of the world to come, where we indulge in transcendent possibilities, on giving respite to […]