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 […]