Listening at Sinai
by Rabbi Nathan Kamesar 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 […]
Welcoming Guests, Welcoming Ourselves
by Rabbi Nathan Kamesar 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 […]
Building New Worlds with our Torah
by Rabbi Nathan Kamesar 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 Holiness of Place
by Rabbi Nathan Kamesar 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 […]
Finding God in Alienation
By Rabbi Nathan Kamesar 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, […]