Amalek is Us?  Only if we let it! Rabbi Cy Stanway The holiday of Purim is beckoned with a Torah portion in which the main commandment is, “Remember what the Amalekites did to you along your way from Egypt, how they met you on your journey when you were tired…

The spoken word can be immensely powerful. Our tradition rests on this awareness. Torah was spoken at Sinai and we speak of the ‘oral traditions’ of Judaism. There is no Jewish knowledge or experience without speech. The sermon is an extension of that. Each sermon I create, whether it be…

I would like you to consider the following two real people, one who is familiar to you and one who probably is not, and whose education and accomplishments are totally different from one another but who share something in common. William Shockley The first comes from the world of electronics.…

When Carl Sagan died a couple of years ago, there were lots of stories about him that began to circulate. One of them is very telling. It is said that he kept a postcard near his shaving mirror. The message read: Dear Friend, just a line to let you know…

When we were youngsters, most of us probably had a pet of some kind. And sooner or later it died. Our parents did not want to be callous nor did they want to make us feel bad just because our goldfish passed on, so they allowed us to bury our…

The Associated Press ran a story some time ago of Andre-Francois Raffray. More than thirty years ago at the age of 47, he worked out a real estate deal with a certain Jeanne Calment, who at that time was 90 years old. He would pay her $500 each month until…

How many of you here this evening remember your first calculator? When you got it, didn’t you think that it was the world just couldn’t get any better? I remember my family’s first calculator. It was a five function Texas Instruments machine with red numbers, nothing quite as sophisticated as…

In the movie Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, there is a scene where Robin comes to a youth taking aim at the archery target and asks him, “Can you shoot amid distractions?” And just before the boy releases the string, Robin pokes his ear with the feathers of an arrow. The…

There is a little story about an American Indian who had a phenomenal memory. He had the amazing ability to recall everything he had done in his long life down to the most minute detail. On the Indian’s one hundredth birthday, he was interviewed by a newspaper reporter. The reporter…

Imagine, if you will, what life would be like without images. We have images for everything. We imagine what our children will be like when they grow up. We imagine what their Bar and Bat Mitzvahs will be like in a few years. We try to see ourselves in different…

If you were to think of the worst day of your life, what would it be?  There are so many different answers and so many different possible ways of having a terrible experience that the constellation of tzoris is as wide as the world is broad.  In fact, the well of pain…

Unless you follow the Nobel Prize, you may not have heard of Mairead Corrigan.  She was a shorthand typist and secretary in Belfast, Northern Ireland. But she wasn’t typing on the afternoon of August 10, 1976. Instead, she and her sister and her three children, hopped on bicycles and went…

There is a very funny e-mail that floats around that almost every rabbi must get at one time or another. It is a small collection of children’s answers to questions that are posed in religious school. For instance, one said that Noah’s wife was “Joan of Arc.” When asked about…

I am a coffee fanatic. I am also a Judaism fanatic. So imagine my joy when I was able to tie in a coffee story to Jewish story. What am I talking about? Let me explain. The word on the street is that Starbucks will soon begin selling instant coffee,…

As you know, it is almost Springtime and Springtime always means planting and  gardening and getting down and dirty in the soil and pray that what grows out  of the ground somewhat resembles the seeds you put into the ground! Now, as I  was getting ready for planting this season…

The profoundly horrific events of Pittsburgh at the Tree of Life synagogue this past Shabbat has given us all pause to consider what it means to be Jewish in America.  There are the statistics that show quite clearly how contemporary American society finds it all too easy to attack Jews.…

When I was a young rabbinic student and had just come back from my first year in Israel, I arrived in Cincinnati for a crash course in leading High Holiday services.  I wasn’t worried about my Hebrew.  That was fine.  I was worried about writing sermons, something I had never…

You probably all know the joke about the young man who came home from school one day and said to his mother, “Mom, I want to become a rabbi!” At which point his mother says, “That’s nice dear. But let me ask you a question: What kind of job is…

Candle Lighting for Lia Bram There is a time for everything under the heavens. So says Kohelet in the Bible. There is a time to live and a time to die. A time to rejoice and a time to weep. Today, at this moment my family and I rejoice. And,…