The Medieval World
While Standing (Six Feet Apart) on One Leg: A Torah for a Virus: 3/18/2020 All trying times give rise to some insightful humor. During the Middle Ages in the time of the bubonic plaque, Jews were suspected of creating the disease and attacked because relatively few Jews got sick. One part of the accusation is…
Imitating Moses
While Standing (6 Feet Apart) on One Foot A Torah for a Virus The story of Moses, Miriam and God has an interesting episode in the Book of Numbers. Miriam and Aaron, Moses’ brother and sister didn’t like that Moses had married a Cushite woman – a black, probably African, woman. They confronted Moses and…
Torah in the Time of Virus: 3-16-20
Moses’ invitation to ’cause people to come together’ is not so much a command to simply bring a big crowd to one spot. Rather it is, literally God saying to Moses, ‘Give these people a cause….and here is the cause. Build something constructive together and make that thing holy
Don’t Be Amalek…Be a Jew
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 and weary, and they attacked…
How I Write Divrei Torah
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 formal or informal is a…
Behold, This One is Good
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. William Shockley was a Nobel…
Bequeathing Values
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 that I am alive and…
The Leprous Words
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 favorite pet. It is a…
Getting All Dressed Up For Work
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 her death so that he…
So That I May Dwell Among You
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 liquid crystal displays, but rather…
