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Shabbat Weekly Dvar Torah

Turning to Kohelet This Sukkot

Oct 5, 2025

Turning to Kohelet This Sukkot

One of the privileges and responsibilities that I have as a congregational professional is serving on the faculty of the Union for Reform Judaism's summer camps. Imagine my surprise when three summers ago, my first serving in the unit at Olin-Sang-Ruby Union Institute (OSRUI) that focuses on the arts for students in the seventh through tenth grades-that our topic was Kohelet, the Book of Ecclesiastes. My immediate reaction was: "It's so dark. This is summer camp where they are supposed to have fun! What are they going to get out of the ramblings of an older person reviewing and lamenting on life?" Three summers later, the staff members-and even some of the campers-are still talking about the session. The mere mention of the word Kohelet evokes a nod, a knowing utterance, of something that was deep yet accessible, provocative yet distressing, memorable and powerful.
Life’s Vulnerability

Oct 3, 2025

Life’s Vulnerability

Parashat Ha’azinu, which we read this Shabbat, is almost entirely poetry: Moses’ farewell song to the people. At the end of his life, he does not leave them with laws or lectures, but with words to be sung. Moses understood that songs linger. A melody can echo in our minds for years, touching the heart as much as the mind. He wanted his message to endure not only as teaching but as music — something that could be carried in memory and spirit. Commenting on a verse that could sound quite bleak - “See now that I, I am He… I put to death and I bring to life” (Deut. 32:39) - Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, z”l, explained that it reveals the rhythm of covenantal life: brokenness and renewal are always intertwined. As we have just emerged from the Ten Days of Repentance, we know this rhythm well. We faced our flaws, our brokenness, and then celebrated the possibility of renewal.
The Shofar Is Calling You

Sep 19, 2025

The Shofar Is Calling You

The sound of the shofar is primal & ancient. It produces a strange sense of awe and reverence. Think back to that moment before the first blast is sounded; a hushed expectancy fills the synagogue. At the moment we hear the first piercing note, we are struck with an almost childlike wonderment. And for most of us, it is one of our earliest childhood memories. The notes of the shofar are not beautiful by any musical standard, but somehow, we find in their thin piercing blasts something that calls to us. We feel connected to the shepherds and kings, the prophets and prophetesses, who first heard these same notes in the land of Israel more than 3000 years ago. But what is the call of the shofar?
Gratitude Is a Muscle

Sep 12, 2025

Gratitude Is a Muscle

The Practice of Gratitude: Parashat Ki Tavo opens with Bikkurim, the offering of first fruits. Israelite farmers were instructed to take the first fruits of their harvest and bring them to the Temple in Jerusalem. They would present their baskets to the priest and recite a formal declaration: a brief retelling of Jewish history, from wandering to slavery to our arrival in the Land, culminating in gratitude to God for the Land and its abundance. But Bikkurim wasn’t just a personal act — it became a ritual of public celebration.
Living with Complexity and Nuance: Double Exposure

Sep 5, 2025

Living with Complexity and Nuance: Double Exposure

I was eight years old in Basel, Switzerland, the day I learned about the way places have layers. It was a chilly, autumn Shabbos, and my father and I were on a walk by the river. My father pointed out different sights as we walked: there is the house where his elementary school friend lived. There is the gate they walked through to get to school, there is the shop run by the woman rumored to be a witch. And there, he said, pointing to a small, shady area, is the place where they burned the Jews in the 14th century. The rest of the afternoon was like a double exposure... For the first time, I began to understand what it is like when something so beautiful becomes, while retaining all its magic, something terrible as well.
Sacred Cycles of Elul

Aug 29, 2025

Sacred Cycles of Elul

Life moves in cycles. The world around us is never static: days rise and fall, seasons turn, tides ebb and flow. Scientists tell us that even the tiniest parts of our bodies - every cell - operate on a circadian rhythm, a 24-hour clock that governs sleep, metabolism, mood, and even immunity. When we live in harmony with these rhythms, we thrive. When we ignore them, everything feels out of balance. The natural world preaches the same lesson. Trees shed their leaves in autumn, not in despair, but in preparation. By letting go, they conserve energy, store life within their roots, and ready themselves for renewal in the spring. What looks like loss is in fact a cycle of strength. The Jewish year is built on this wisdom of cycles.
Kashrut: Why?

Aug 22, 2025

Kashrut: Why?

It is a rabbinic dictum not to attempt to weigh the value of one mitzvah against the other. Rather than saying that this mitzvah is more important than another, we are to recognize that all mitzvot are grounded in our brit (covenant) with the Holy One and derive their authority out of our chosen response to God's will. And yet... it is hard to resist the temptation to create a hierarchy. So, at least in the popular mind, there are some mitzvot so central to Jewish identity that they are almost synonymous with Judaism itself. Lighting Shabbat candles, wearing a head covering, and kashrut, the dietary laws. So central, in fact, is kashrut, that it has become the way to refer to any action or person that is moral, upright, and proper. In that sense, it has even entered the English language.
Profound Gratitude

Aug 15, 2025

Profound Gratitude

Let’s be honest: sometimes it takes losing something to truly appreciate what we had. For many of us, gratitude only kicks in when the Wi-Fi drops… or worse, the phone drops (!), and we brace ourselves for the worst only to flip it over and realize it’s not broken. That moment of relief? That’s modern-day gratitude. On a more serious note, when health, mobility, or time slip away, the fragility of these things becomes starkly clear. At 50, facing a terminal neurological condition (PSP – Progressive Supranuclear Palsy) and having just experienced the first need to use a wheelchair, life has come into sharper focus. And I can honestly say I feel enormous gratitude for the blessings I have and continue to receive. It’s a perspective shift forced upon me one I’m not sure I would have arrived at on my own.
Baseless Love

Aug 8, 2025

Baseless Love

Each year, in the dog days of summer, our text and our tradition point us towards love. Coming out of the intense mourning of Tisha B’Av, we find ourselves poised at the nexus of Shabbat Nachamu, the Shabbat of Comfort and Shabbat Vaetchanan, this Shabbat on which we read the Torah’s commandment to love God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our strength. And tonight, largely unnoticed outside of Israel, we’ll celebrate Tu B’Av…. And, while the modern celebrations mirror our Hallmark holiday, Tu B’Av appears in rabbinic literature and beyond as a day of comfort and healing, a return to love after the pain and grief of Tisha B’Av — commemorating tragedies in Jewish history and considered to be the saddest day on the Jewish calendar.
Nothing So Whole as a Broken Heart

Aug 1, 2025

Nothing So Whole as a Broken Heart

There’s a well-known story (apocryphal or true, we’ll never know) of Napoleon riding by a synagogue on Tisha B’Av (which falls tomorrow night through Sunday) and hearing wailing and crying from within. When he asked an aide what was going on, he was told the Jews were mourning the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem 2,000 years before. His response: “A nation that cries and fasts for over 2,000 years for their land and Temple will surely be rewarded with both.” I heard that story for the first time at Camp Pembroke, the Jewish girls camp I attended from ages 9 to 19. And the main question that I remember thinking about the story at the time was: Why were they crying so loudly that Napoleon could hear them from outside!?!