This is a sermon about not giving in to despair. I know: You can’t imagine how I came up with this as a topic for my annual, Kol Nidre sermon. Here is a Jewish “despair” joke. A Jew accidently falls into a deep hole and can’t climb out. A philosopher walks by and says, “My […]

The relationship between world Jewry, the Zionist movement and the State of Israel has never been simple and it has a long history. In 1897, Ahad Ha-Am (aka, Asher Ginzberg) published an essay in Ha-Shiloah, the Hebrew monthly he edited from Odessa, entitled, “The Jewish State and the Jewish Problem”. In the essay, Ginzberg argued […]

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about angels. That may sound surprising coming from a Reconstructionist rabbi. After all, I have said many times from this bima that I do not believe in a supernatural God as described in the Bible—a God who can suspend the laws of nature, who is all-knowing, all powerful and ever-present. It […]