Rabbi Brad Hirschfield 
Taking a chance to represent faith on a stage that is not exactly teeming with people like you
Finding the right words to encapsulate both joy and sadness.
Standing at the intersection of painful humility and profound possibility.
Let’s try a thought experiment—an easy one, actually—because it invites us into a moment in which we all have found ourselves many, many times.
In an era of identitarian politics and a general fascination with identity writ large — be it racial, religious, gender, sexual, ethnic, or another — I keep returning to the words written by Pete Townshend and belted out by Roger Daltry on the title track to The Who’s 1978 album, Who Are You.
I had the privilege of spending this past Tuesday in Washington, D.C., with Elan Babchuck at the Religious Freedom and Business Foundation’s national gathering, Dare to Overcome.
The Sages distinguish between two Passover celebrations — the first one, called Pesach Mitzrayim, the Passover of Egypt, and every other Passover celebration after that one, known as Pesach Dorot, the Passover of subsequent generations.
As the wine steward said to Pharaoh in Genesis 41:9, “I declare my sins now.” The sin I declare now is my tone-deafness to the significance of this week’s solar eclipse. I just didn’t understand why it was such a big deal to so many people, including to many of the Rabbinic Fellows in Clal’s LEAP program, run in partnership with the University of Pennsylvania’s Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies.
