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A Seder Plate

Pesah, Protest, and Poetry

We just got finished celebrating beautiful, if painful, Passover Seders in our homes and in community.
I wanted to begin by sharing the words with which I opened our Seder here at Society Hill Synagogue, with over 150 people across the generations crammed warmly in our social hall:

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Jewish Insights on Regret

Would you rather hear an audio recording of Rabbi Nathan Kamesar giving this D’var Torah? Listen here! Sparks of regret. It’s hard to imagine a span of a life not including many of these. A life. How about a year, a month, a week? There

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The Torah of the Material and Spiritual

I’m thinking this week about the distinction between the material and the spiritual. Before I go further I should probably define the word spiritual. Depending on your sensibility, the word can either be a turn-off or an invitation to explore; something to which you say,

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The Sacred Art of Listening

When I introduce the shema, that central call of Jewish tradition, I often say it is the call to listen—to listen to the one-ness that underlies and connects all of life. In some ways, that understates the case for the centrality of the act of

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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