Welcoming Guests, Welcoming Ourselves
This past Shabbat, we celebrated all the new members who have joined this community in the last year or so. In honor of our growth as a community, I offered the following teaching on what it means to make ourselves—all of us—feel more at home in this congregation, and in this life: On previous New […]
Building New Worlds with our Torah
One of the core features of the Bar Mitzvah is when a student offers his own teaching, his own D’var Torah—words of Torah reflecting his interpretation of his Torah portion after a period of wrestling with it. As Rabbis Arthur Waskow and Phyllis Berman put it, “This is the core of the Bar Mitzvah event, […]
The Holiness of Place
I made a pilgrimage this week. Not to Mecca, or even to Jerusalem, but to La Jolla, California. La Lolla, if you don’t know, is an idyllic seaside village just north of San Diego, and it’s where I was born. Despite not living there for more than a few months, it has been my home […]
Finding God in Alienation
Dear Friends, About a month after October 7, my wife Caroline, stretching to find something with which to introduce the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and, more precisely, a pathway through it to a better future — to our daughters Lila, 4 (and a half, she would want me to say), and Nina, nearly 2, encountered this column by […]
Thank you, and upcoming events
Dear Friends, I want to start by saying thank you. Thank you so much for your collective response to our call for contributions at the end of the year to help us meet this community’s needs. We exceeded our ambitious goal of $45,000 and it makes such a difference in our efforts to continue to […]