|
|
|
Rabbi's Torah
|
|
|
|
Rabbi Marc Kline’s thoughts and views on this week’s Parashah!
The most heart-wrenching recurring storyline in history involves the controversies that rip families apart. We cry over the many different versions of the Romeo and Juliet love stories wherein families hate each other more than they love their own children. So fixated are these hardened hearts on being right that people’s broken spirits forget to […]
What does it mean to know God? In this week’s portion, God introduces God’s self by “name.” God spoke to Moses, saying, “I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob with the name El Shaddai (Almighty God), but with My name YHWH, I did not become known to them.” (Exodus 6) We look to […]
The voices who encouraged the violence on the 6th must bear responsibility for this attempted coup. One cannot continue to ramp up the rhetoric and the hate and then walk away and claim it was not his/hers/their fault. Perpetuating lies and calling for violence comes with a cost. This is the story we also begin […]
In 31 years of serving as Rabbi and Chaplain, I have served at many hundreds of funerals/memorials. At each, I have always tried helping family and friends moving through their immediate grief and loss. I love knowing that even as people leave our hands, they never leave our hearts. I love that our tradition forces […]
Show of hands – how many of you are afraid? It’s okay; no one is watching to see if you did or didn’t, but I think deep down inside, we are all afraid. While our fears certainly root in our insecurity on so many levels, many of us know we are afraid but don’t know […]
We are dreamers—people dream. Each of us dreams at night and dreams during the day: dreams of future successes and failures, personal and communal. From Midrash Rabbah, we learn, “Rabbi Yochanan said: All dreams are dependent on the interpretation given to them, except for a dream about wine. Sometimes a dream of drinking wine bodes […]
Whether we like it or not, our children are watching. They are often more perceptive than the most expensive spies using exorbitant technologies. Your children don’t spy on you; they live with you. They are not tracking your spending account or phone records. They listen and observe and learn how you live, how you think, […]
I sat down to read the other night and got so engrossed in the book that I lost track of time. I also lost track of the mendacity of what purports to be our respective realities. With all the challenges with which “news sources” bombard us, sometimes it is hard to escape. Binge-watching a series […]
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the unsung heroes in history. The people behind the scenes who quietly do the work of making the great people look even better. There is still one role in life harder to play than the “behind the scenes” hero – it is the forgotten one. People in the […]
I want to share a story about a dog. Bing, the dog of war, parachuted into France with his sniper handler to become a D-Day hero. Bing was one of the first dogs to be parachuted and dropped behind enemy lines alongside British paratroopers. He landed on Normandy to sniff out trouble before troops entered […]