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,…