What does Judaism say about the afterlife?
I am so glad we were able to have a scholar-in-residence last Shabbat on the topic of Jewish beliefs in the afterlife. Here is what I shared on Friday night to help frame our learning: This need sparked for me at a funeral I officiated for a congregant’s elderly father a few years ago. At […]
The Hidden God
The other night I was reading my four and a half year old daughter Lila a bedtime story. We have a routine that she gets to watch two music videos and read three stories before bed (I spoil her, I know). So we’re on our fifth and final piece of content for the evening […]
Listening at Sinai
Last week’s Torah portion was Parashat Yitro, the portion in which the Israelites receive the revelation of Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai. Here at Society Hill Synagogue we spoke last Saturday morning about what the nature of that revelation was—what did the people hear as they stood there at the foot of the mountain? A […]
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 Aiden 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 […]