Rabbi’s Torah Commentary

Anointing Priests is sacred work. Torah spends a lot of time talking about how the priests are set aside from the rest of the people in order to maintain their "holy and pure" status. God commands them to shave their heads and their bodies to distinguish them from the wider population. They must wear special […]

Every day we have to confront the struggle between the value of what we do and the value of what we believe. I am a big believer in the idea that paying attention matters, and so reading provides us an opportunity to see how people live this duality of belief and behavior. Doing so should […]

Yesterday, my wife and I spent the day texting in only Beatles song titles. It was cute, and I had to struggle to remember enough titles to make coherent (or almost coherent) messages. I marveled at just how many songs the "Fab Four" gave us. They spoke to so many themes and wrote in so […]

It was 25 years ago that I closed my law office in Little Rock, Arkansas. I was moving to Jerusalem for my first year as a Rabbinical Student, and everything was moving at a whirlwind pace. I had given away cases that were worth millions and cases that were strictly pro-bono, but it all happened […]

Perhaps the line that appears most often in the Torah reads, “God said to Moses, Speak to the people …” It was Moses’ job to teach people. To transmit the teaching from God to the people and back, and to create and foster meaningful relationships with the community … these are Moses’ tasks, whether or […]

These days I find it challenging to open the Newsfeed applications on my computer. I hit the button and close my eyes, hoping that stories of blessings replace those of pain which I am expecting to read. While there are certainly amazing things happening in the world, we do not often get them on the […]

I was speaking to my mom who was telling me of her last Dr’s. visit. She had a pretty clean bill of health for a woman who has been through a great many challenges in life. I know the many challenges that she faces. Still, though, I always get to hear about the luncheons she […]

It is hard to be creative, having to write about the same portion two weeks in a row; especially when that means three or four different sermonic ideas on the same text. Last week, we read Parashat Shemini. We are doing it again this week. We are in the midst of a holiday based calendar […]

My Rabbi gave me some great advice before I left the practice of law to head off to Rabbinical school. Rabbi Gene Levy told me to remember the following: 1. If I don’t ask myself every day, “What am I doing here?” I do not belong. 2. Hebrew Union College (the Rabbinical seminary) is a […]

This year, our congregation celebrated a week-long of Purim. It was not intentional, but sort of just happened. We did a Purim play in religious school for older kids, another for the whole school, and another for adults on a Saturday night. Passover is shaping up the same way. If we include the various religious […]