Mundane Into Sacred

Being a Chief Listener
Mundane Into Sacred, This Week In Wisdom, Weekly Parsha |
January 18, 2023

Being a Chief Listener

In my first job out of rabbinical school, I served as an assistant rabbi of a congregation of over 1000 families. As many new rabbis experience, I felt I should know everything and was embarrassed that I didn’t. On bigger points about the direction of synagogue programs, I guessed. I tried to create new things and make changes, but it didn’t feel like enough people heard or were inspired by my vision. This week’s Torah portion contains a story embedded in most Jews’ memories from years of Passover seders: the 10 plagues.......

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Rabbi Julia Appel
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Don't Try To Be the Hero of Your Story 
Breaking False Dichotomies, Compassion and Empathy, Longform, Mundane Into Sacred, This Week In Wisdom, Uncategorized |
March 10, 2022

Don’t Try To Be the Hero of Your Story 

With two elementary-school-aged kids, we hear a fair amount of sibling fighting, with only some of it unprovoked. When one of them is getting a little too wild, and, say, someone’s limbs smack into someone else’s body, their first reaction is to say, “I didn’t mean to do it!” And while my wife and I do draw a distinction between purposeful versus accidental actions, we try to focus more on the consequences and how to make it right afterward. That’s what’s so striking about this week’s Torah portion, Vayikra. It outlines the......

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Geoff Mitelman
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Freedom to Give
Bring The Sacred Down To Earth, Compassion and Empathy, Longform, Longform, Mundane Into Sacred |
February 04, 2022

Freedom to Give

“A contract is a transaction. A covenant is a relationship. A contract is about interests. A covenant is about identity. That is why contracts benefit, but covenants transform.“ In these terse words of enduring wisdom, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks draws our attention to the covenants we might long have overlooked and the contracts that we mistook for something more (see Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times for additional wisdom). Such was certainly the case for the Israelites, as becomes evident in this week’s Torah portion, T’rumah (Exodus 25:1 – 27:19). It......

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Joshua Stanton
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