On Sunday, May 5 the Woodstock Jewish Congregation held a celebration in honor of my 25 years with the congregation. I wanted to offer a teaching, but I had too much to say! So I decided to boil down my teachings into aphorism, a la Pirkei Avot. Here they are: PIRKEI D’RABBI JONATHAN SAYINGS OF RABBI […]
Archive | Teachings
Passover Reflections 2013
Dear Friends, At the Seder, after telling the story of Passover and singing “Dayenu”, we are instructed to lift our cup of liberation and recite what to me is the most important line in the Haggadah: “B’chol dor vador – In every generation we must view ourselves as personally traveling from oppression to liberation.” Whether […]
The Ten Utterances from Life Unfolding
After Moses and the Children of Israel escape from bondage, they are faced with a momentous challenge that forever shapes the worldview of Judaism. They must now create a society in which no Pharaoh might ever rise, a society in which every single human being is understood to be a child of God and therefore […]
Addressing the Family of a Suicide Victim
Dear Friends of the WJC, Our community experienced a tragic and untimely death this past week when Lee Wind, whose family have been members of our congregation for many years, took his own life. Rather than dance around the tragedy of suicide, I chose at the funeral to speak directly about the extraordinarily widespread incidence […]
You Gotta Have Heart: Yom Kippur 5771
Some of you will remember this story: the Children of Israel have escaped slavery in Egypt. They have received the Torah at Mount Sinai, and now it is time to enter the Promised Land. Moses asks for 12 scouts, each a leader from one of the twelve tribes, to scout out the land and bring back a […]
The Virtues of Ambivalence
The following is my sermon from the first day of Rosh Hashanah, 5771 (September 9, 2010) at the Woodstock Jewish Congregation. Just a few weeks ago, in the same hospital in Haifa, Israel where she was born, my niece Talia gave birth to her first child, a boy. My parents became great grandparents, my brother Dan and […]
Yom Hashoah 5770/2010: German Scholar Thorsten Wagner Visits the Woodstock Jewish Congregation
In April 2009 I traveled to Germany for the first time. I was privileged to lead a group of 30 travelers from the Woodstock Jewish Congregation and the wider community on an intensive – and intensely emotional – tour of Berlin and of the historical site of the Ravensbruck concentration camp. Here is what I wrote from […]