How fitting it is that, in our annual cycle of Torah reading, some part of the Exodus narrative always coincides with the celebration of the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Some call the Exodus story the “master narrative” of the Jewish people because it tells the story of m’avdut l’herut-how a people can […]

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 […]