Writings

The High Holy Days: Opening our eyes to the beauty of the everyday
Rabbi Rami Shapiro tells a beautiful Hassidic story. Once, during the High Holy Days, the great mystic Rabbi Yitzchak Luria heard a Bat Kol, Hebrew for ‘Daughter of The voice… God’s voice’, telling him...
Hanukkah: Seeing Your Light Within
Rabbi Ed Feinstein tells a story about a young boy meeting the great mystic and civil rights leader Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel on Rosh HaShanna: During the ritual of Duchenen, (the ceremony where the Kohanim, Jews of priestly descent...
Creating a Sacred Congregation
​We are all standing before God. Each and every one of us. Each and every day of our lives. Across the generations, past and future. And in each generation, teaches Rabbi Donnie Hartman, in each expression of the Torah...
The Gift of Fire
Elie Wiesel, May his soul rest in peace, tells of the poet who was asked what he would save from his burning home. Only one thing. What would it be? The poet answered that he would save the fire itself, for without the fire, life would not be worth living...
Passover: Engraving Freedom in our Hearts
In our Torah, we read about the tenth plague that God inflicted on the Egyptians, the killing of their firstborn. Immediately before the plague commenced, God paused the drama and relayed to Moses and to Aaron what seemed to be at best irrelevant...
Finding God in the Everyday
Rabbi Yaakov Shimshon of Kosov (Ukraine, 1814 - 1880) loved to share with his students the stories of the great Jewish mystics, the Hassidim. It once happened after morning prayers that Rabbi Yaakov began to tell one story after another...
The Marketplace of Debate & Ideas
​I remember years ago, when I was in my twenties, spending hours upon hours, frustratingly trying to decode the legal minutia of a 7th Century Babylonian Talmudic text: What happens when an honorary trustee accidentally comes upon a piece of lost property...
Letting in the Light
The ancient Jewish sages characterized the Bible as a love letter from God to humanity. Every year, the Jewish people re-read, re-examine, and struggle with this letter on Shabbat and the Jewish holidays. (From Rabbi Pinchas Peli’s “Torah Today”)...