The world has changed irrevocably since we gathered last Rosh Hashanah. When I gave my talk then, the holiday seemed to come in its normal time, in a relatively normal world. True, the Jewish world is never completely normal. Even in better times, we have our communal disagreements, our resentments and grudges. Politics, Israel, an …
My favorite childhood stories describe protagonists passing through a barrier into an alternate reality. Alice falls through a rabbit hole into a subterranean Wonderland. Max escapes into a jungle and dances with the delightful Wild Things. Milo takes a toy car ride through the Phantom Tollbooth. One of the first Hebrew stories I read was …
The last time I was in the Kinneret, we stumbled upon a fascinating museum located on a sleepy kibbutz: the grandly named Museum of Yarmukian Culture. The museum houses a remarkable array of pottery dug up just beyond the kibbutz boundary, by the river Yarmuk. Created some 8,000 years ago, the pottery is the earliest known …
For those who love Yiddish writers and literary intrigue, a JTA article this week told a remarkable story about the archives of the great writer Chaim Grade, which, thanks to the joint efforts of YIVO and Israel’s National Library, is now available in its entirety online. (According to the archives description, it contains items in many languages, including Turkmen, …
Recently, I had the pleasure of reading a book that sat on my shelf for two decades, languishing there because I was put off by the somewhat dry, academic title: David Ruderman’s Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe. I wish I hadn’t waited. The book is truly a magnum opus, presenting a compelling, …
Environmental historian Laura J. Martin, in her recent book Wild by Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration, distinguishes between three philosophies of managing wild areas–conservation, preservation, restoration: Conservation… concerns the sustainable use of natural resources like trees, water, and fish. The goal is to extract, and perhaps actively replenish, economically valuable species and materials in a …
Sermon for the first day of Rosh Hashanah, 2022 / 5783 The Lord endowed Solomon with wisdom and discernment in great measure, with understanding as vast as the sands on the seashore. … He discoursed about trees, from the cedar in Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of the wall; and he discoursed about …
for Shavuot 5782 / 2022 Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offense. Robert Frost, “Mending Wall” What’s the most important mitzvah in the Torah? Is there an “Ur-mitzvah,” one mitzvah that stands above the others as …
The past is never dead. It’s not even past. Faulkner When I was growing up in the 1970s, Holocaust survivors were all around us–our neighbors, relatives, members of our synagogues. Some of them were willing to talk about their experiences, to show the numbers tattooed in their arms; others were unable or unwilling for their …
Yom HaShoah, Never Again, and My Ukrainian Roots Read More »