Episodes
Thursday Oct 10, 2019
Thursday Oct 10, 2019
The signature prayers of Yom Kippur are confessionals whereby everyone says together lines including "We have been guilty of slander" and "We have sinned wittingly and unwittingly." The language is often felt to be archaic. What does it mean for someone to say "We've slandered!" I use examples from my own life, starting with a congregational rabbi's relationship with my community, to make it real, and then I expand to other relationships in my life, and to The Choice we all have to make: Can I live a life of relationships in which there is no "higher" and "lower" in the relationship? Can I live in which we're all just travellers on the earth trying to relate to each other in a real way, with no "higher" and "lower" judgments? Our greatest power in "teshuvah," changing our lives for the better, is to purposefully ask of our relationships, "Is this the kind of relationship I want to be having?" And if the answer is no, then I try to give a guide for changing it. My sources are the books: Tribal Leadership, The Choice, and the essays of Natalia Ginzburg ("The Little Virtues").
Thursday Oct 10, 2019
The Middle Way: Conservative Judaism Without Apology
Thursday Oct 10, 2019
Thursday Oct 10, 2019
Conservative Judaism is pretty much always on the defensive these days. We live in a world where all the legitimacy is ascribed to the Left or to the Right, and the voice of the Middle Way is discounted, even by those who are living it! In the sermon, I try to show that the deepest religious path of spirituality, wisdom, and practice is The Middle Way. In a world where conviction is shown in the extremes, we ought to embrace the holiness of truly believing and practicing The Religion of Hillel, not of Shammai.