• The Other 75%

    I would like draw our attention to the other 75%.  The approximately 75% of Jews who, according to the Pew report, do not attend a shul and do not feel that Jewish community or Jewish observance is a necessary part of being a Jew.  We spend a lot of time thinking about, teaching, and interacting…

  • Serving G-d in every Moment

    October 30, 2013 The Torah describes Sara our foremother’s death by enumerating the years of her life.   Then the verse repeats, “…these were the years of Sara’s life.”   Rash”i is bothered by this repetition, and comments, “All of them were equally for good.” The Rebbe of Tosh, Rabbi Meshulam Feish Segal, may he live and…

  • The Lesson of Tishuvah

    This month of Elul leads up to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.  It is a time of reflection and tishuvah, return, but with what should we emerge from this process? Elul, Rosh Hashanah, the 10 Days of Tishuvah and Yom Kippur culminates in a service performed once a year on Yom Kippur itself, on the…

  • The Stranger Within Your Gates: Answering Questions about Bais Abraham’s Recent Eshel Shabbat

    On a recent Shabbat, Bais Abraham hosted speakers from Eshel (www.eshelonline.org), a national organization building communities of support, learning, and inclusion for Orthodox lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Jews. The three speakers were LGBT Orthodox individuals, two of whom came to observance later in life and one of whom grew up Chassidic. They each shared…

  • Maharat: A new Model of Leadership

    Orthodox Jews believe that men and women are fundamentally different.  They have different characteristics, different strengths, different obligations and different ways of seeing the world and approaching life.  Thus, it follows that especially for us, (as opposed perhaps to more liberal Jewish movements in which the boundaries between the genders might be more blurred), it…

  • Purim 2013

    Finding God where He is not…in our world In less than a week, on March 20th, Jews will celebrate the holiday of Purim.  Though not as well known by many as other holidays, Purim is actually considered perhaps the most important Jewish holiday.  The Midrash, a first-century Jewish commentary on the Bible, writes that in…

  • Physical beauty Transformed: From Anthony Weiner to Sara of the Bible

    I recently came across a fascinating blog. It is authored by an anonymous single mother in San Francisco who suffered horrendous sexual abuse as a child at the hands of her own father and contains some of the deepest spiritual insights I have read. In a post entitled “Does your grandmother look good naked?” she…

  • Spirituality in the Gritty Reality: Lessons from the Spies

    In this week’s Torah portion, Shelach, the Jewish people have completed the short trek from Mount Sinai to the Land of Israel.  God tells them to send the heads of each tribe as spies to spy out the Land of Israel.  After 40 days the spies return. Ten spies bring a bad report of the…

  • Learning from Hillel and Shami

    A Brooklyn based newspaper, Yated Ne’eman, has recently tried to cast more inclusive sections of Orthodoxy in a negative light.  Instead of understanding Rabbi Zev Farber’s recent Morethodoxy post about the cultural place of women in shul as a tension between two competing values, that of traditional prayer architecture and process on the one hand…

  • Shavuot 2012

    It is not easy for people who share the same religious beliefs to see themselves as one. Due to differences they often label each other heretics and fanatics and deem each other guilty of undermining the welfare, identity, and religious underpinnings of the whole. Soon Jewish people all over the world will celebrate the Biblical…

  • Passover 2012: When We all must Become Children

    “One is obligated to see themselves on the Seder night as if they are actually now leaving Egypt.”  -Maimonides “The child at the Seder asks: “Why is this night different from all other nights?  On all other nights we eat leavened or unleavened bread but on this night only unleavened.  On all other nights we…

  • The Holy Society

    “Hyim we will need your help tonight with a tahara,” said my father. “But I have never done one,” I replied. “There are only two of us available, and I hear the man was heavy, bloated, so we will need you.” A tahara (literally “purification”) is the Jewish process of washing, dressing and preparing a dead body for…

  • Thoughts about Death and Living Life

    One of my favorite stories is one told of a great rabbi and mystic who lived several centuries ago, Rabbi Menachem Mendal of Kotzk.  He asked his students, “What would you do if you knew you had only one more week to live?”  The first answered, “I would spend it with my family,” another said,…

  • When not to Act Piously

    Recently I came across a passage in the Misilat Yisharim (Path of the Just) by Rabbi Moshe Chaim Lutzato, that seems so prescient of the times we are living in now as Jews with all our infighting and outfighting and acting out on the right and left.  If we keep in the forefront of our…

  • What’s in a Beracha (Blessing)

    In this past Shabbat’s parsha Yaakov blesses his children with unusual blessings.  We imagine blessings to be good wishes or promises for the future, here though Yaakov seems to bless his children by describing them, their strengths and weaknesses, in some instances, such as Shimon and Levi, only mentioning their weaknesses.  What kind of blessing…

  • Fear and Loathing in Beit Shemesh

    Rape is not about sex, it’s about violence.  So too Orthodox Jewish men attacking little Orthodox Jewish girls in Beit Shemesh because they were wearing short sleeves this past week http://www.jta.org/news/article/2011/12/27/3090916/israelis-rally-around-naama-women  was not, God forbid about tzniut, the Jewish notion of modesty (the perpetrated acts were of course anything but modest),  but about power. In Israel religion is…

  • Why Some Orthodox Jews in Israel are Violent

    Why don’t Orthodox Jews in America act violently against women who are not dressed modestly, while some in Israel do?   There are to my knowledge almost no such outbursts in the USA, whereas in Israel we read about them quite often, such as this week  http://www.jta.org/news/article/2011/12/27/3090916/israelis-rally-around-naama-women    In fact the attitude of even right…

  • Hanukkah 2011: A Hanukkah Irony

    Hanukkah today is a holiday of great irony. Though not a Biblical holiday, and certainly not Judaism’s most essential holiday, Hanukkah has taken on an exaggerated importance in America, due I think, to its calandrical proximity with one of Christianity’s most important festivals. Hanukkah commemorates the war in the year 166 B.C.E. between the Jews…

  • Were our Avot Perfect? (Part 2)

    Last week I wrote a blog post on another blog in which I suggested Abraham had on some level failed the test of bringing his son Isaac as a sacrifice on Mount Moriah.  That instead of bringing him perhaps the more ethical response would have been to protect the innocent child even in the face…

  • It is Meritorious to be a Jew: The Conversion of Children

    Recently I met with a young couple whose wedding I will soon perform.  They are both observant and the man was born a Jew.  The woman was converted as a young child since her mother was not Jewish, though her father was.   She and her siblings were converted as children by a very Chashuv Rav…