There is an invitation for collective teshuvah in front of us at this moment of history, being proffered by too many modern-day prophets to count, and by too many to ignore, taking the form of the movement for reparations. This critical piece of teshuvah is an invitation for the collective to develop its moral conscience, to look at how old harms continue to live with us until they are addressed, to notice how we are implicated even in histories we didn’t actively participate in.
Read moreToward a Galactic Judaism (Audio Podcast)
Rosh Hashanah reminds us to think beyond the human scale of our lives, and get on Cosmic terms. Is our Judaism big enough to go galactic? And what does a Cosmic consciousness require of us in the here and now?
Read moreParashat Eikev: Reparations 101 (Audio Podcast)
Parashat Eikev offers another Jewish entry point to a consideration of reparations. “Beware,” Moshe says, “lest you come to think that your good fortune is of your own doing.”
Read moreThe Plain of Threading (Audio Podcast)
Shabbat Chazon 5782
Where evening becomes day, light alternates with leaf, and experience becomes story.
Featuring Min Hametzar – Psalm 118:5; Setting: Rabbi Shefa Gold.
Conditions for Prophecy (Audio Podcast)
Prophecy is not dead. But it does require the right conditions to emerge. What are the insights waiting to come from or through us? How can we make it easier to hear them?
Read moreThe Walls are Broken, But We Ain't Done Yet: Fasting as Community Protest (Audio) + New Niggun
Tisha B’Av, coming up in a few weeks, might be a cautionary tale. This is what destruction looks like. This is what it looks like when there’s nothing left to be done. But the 17th of Tammuz is a blueprint for possibility. “Do something now,” it seems to tell us. Fast. Plead. It’s not too late. It’s not over yet. A drash for 17 Tammuz.
Plus a new niggun, “Niggun in the Breach” performed by the Ner Shalom Good Shabbos Band – Suzanne Shanbaum, Sheridan Gold, and Irwin Keller.
Read more(Audio Podcast) A Nameless Angel and a Woman whose Name Might or Might Not Have Been Tzlelponit
story from the Book of Judges about an angel prophesying the miraculous birth of a child, and the unnamed woman who was to be Samson's mother. (AUDIO)
Read moreSky of Iron (Profit, Guns & Leviticus) – Audio Podcast
If there is some balance between human and nature, and between human and Divine, that’s represented in the Book of Leviticus, then these terrible consequences are not a doling out of punishment, but the natural outcome of letting the delicate balance fail. We understand this now, in a new way, in this time we live in where every year we wonder if the sky will be like iron and the earth like copper.
Read moreNot Torah, Not Time, Not Community (Audio Podcast)
A little about what Torah, time, and community might mean.
It is the moon, not the sun, that governs our dreams. And we needed to dream a different life, to dream a renewed self, before we could even think of putting on our sandals, packing our matzah, and taking our first step toward freedom. So now is the time we are commanded to follow the unfolding of the moons.
Read moreCircumstance and Call: Two Years of Pandemic (Audio Podcast)
Every call happens in a circumstance, and every circumstance has, if we listen for it, a call. We have spent two years refining our ability to live in our conditions while responding to the Divine call arising from them. Let us not stop being prophets just because we are getting some of the goodies back. Let us not sweep the pain we feel or the revelations we’ve received under the rug of normalcy.
Read moreProsper our Hands (Audio Podcast)
We are in a time of general emergency, it seems to me. A time in which we need our hands to be especially skillful. We need our hands to be busy in the work of peacemaking, tending, healing. May it be said that in our time, the hands of peacemakers were blessed. A drash for Parashat Pekudei, plus a new song – Vihi Noam.
Read moreThe [Jewish] Gifts of Ukraine (Audio Podcast)
It is important to resist any schmaltzy Fiddler-style nostalgia for Jewish life as it was once lived in the Ukraine. But it is also right to notice how that land is imprinted on us, and how we are imprinted on it. There are not many places you can go in the world that doesn’t have some Jewish imprint. In Ukraine it is profound.
Read moreThe Priest's Armor: Protection Magic for All Who Serve (Audio Podcast)
The priest’s regalia as described in this week’s portion, is not just fancy clothes; it is protection magic. Designed to deflect, to protect, to allow the priestly service to continue despite the magnitude of what the priest processes.
So I ask you: what is your protection magic?
Architecture for the Divine (Audio Podcast)
I sat in the resonating chamber of the Great Synagogue, just as I had stood at the Temple of Poseidon, and wondered about this human impulse to build a house for the gods. Why? We could go outside and worship on a mountain, or before an altar of ocean, or in the Italian countryside among colonnades of umbrella pines. But no, instead we build structures of great weight, at great expense, even though their bulging doric columns are designed to call to mind the trees just outside the door.
Joseph's Bones: An Epilogue (Audio Podcast)
Joseph is not asking for the transport of their physical bones. Joseph is asking the Children of Israel – asking us – to raise up, to honor, to carry forward with us, their complex and multiple qualities. Their fullness. Their selves. And that is what we are about to do. Even if it has taken 4000 years and 7000 miles to make good on Joseph’s request.
The Animal Instinct (Audio Podcast)
Once upon a time we were animals alongside the other animals – before we evolved the self-awareness that cut us off from the others, that got us caught in our heads, in our bodies, in our civilizations; that got us kicked out of Eden. Now we only have a dim memory of what it is like to be the animals that we are. And so we seek out, through our imaginations and our liturgy and our magic, the connection with the animal world that even the ridiculous amount of DNA we share with other creatures can no longer provide.
Read moreAnyone Can Whistle: Sondheim and our Queer, Jewish Longing to Belong (Audio)
Sondheim's sense of “in it but not of it” is not just a gay vantagepoint in 20th Century art, but a Jewish vantagepoint also. American Ashkenazi Jews of the mid-20th Century, the children or grandchildren of immigrants, were also involved in a struggle to assimilate into a culture that wasn’t theirs. And they often had a dramatic influence on that culture, creating much of what we imagine as American! But still, maybe because of that authorship, having a burdensome awareness of the artificiality of American culture. The arbitrariness of naturalness. So we see in his writing that deep Jewish longing to let go and belong, even while questioning the authenticity of the thing we want to belong to.
Read moreDinah, Rittenhouse, and Male Violence (Audio Podcast)
The acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse comes during the week of Vayishlach, and the painful Torah story of Dinah. What do these stories have to tell us about how our society looks at male violence? And how might we still see, hear, and heal Dinah?
Read moreYHWH Was in this Place (Audio Podcast)
A prophetic dream helps Jacob recognize the Divine that is immanent in space. What do we need to do to have a zap of realization? It's easy when we're in stunning nature. Harder at the hospital.
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