• The Purpose of Mitzvot

    Do mitzvot have reasons or are they purely a Divine decree?  Should we live lives insulated from other cultures or integrated with them?   Is religious life an ascetic one or should we take advantage of life’s pleasures?  Lots of theological profundities which impact the way we live our lives are the subject of much…

  • Adam One as Paradigm for Communal Spiritual Leadership

    Synagogue rabbis today are teachers, administrators, and pastors.  They give sermons, raise money, teach classes, facilitate Jewish lifecycle events, answer halakhic questions, coordinate meetings, occasionally change lightbulbs, absorb the anger and anxiety of individuals for the sake of the community’s greater health, assist Bar and Bat Mitzvah children with their drashot, comfort the mourner, support…

  • The Torah Value of Decentralized Power

    Recently a prominent Orthodox rabbi was arrested for voyeurism, for putting cameras in a mikvah. Much has been written already about what must be learned from this horrific abuse of power. Perhaps rabbis require more oversight and annual reviews, perhaps there should be more women’s leadership around issues of mikvah, tighter security at mikvaot, etc.…

  • My Brethren in Gaza

    I feel terrible for the people of Gaza.  They live under the rule of a violent oppressor.  But their oppressor is not Israel, it is Hamas, a terrorist entity whose very name means anger and whose actions seem to so revolve around war and hatred, that they cannot spend adequate money, time, or effort on the welfare…

  • Some St. Louis History: Bais Abraham Congregation Celebrates 120 years

    The Orthodox Jewish community of St. Louis dates back to the early 19th century.  Though it began small, in the 1880’s and 1890’s waves of Orthodox Jews from Russia and Poland emigrated to the United States and to St. Louis.  By the 1940’s there were close to 25 Orthodox synagogues in St. Louis.  These congregations for…

  • Ark as Metaphor

    In synagogues, the world over Jewish people are reading the Biblical book of Exodus, with its quintessential moment of Jewish history. The Children of Israel, several weeks after their exodus from Egypt, reach Mount Sinai and there receive the two tablets of stone on which is written the ten commandments, followed by the rest of…

  • Different Roles

    I came across THIS ARTICLE by Rabbi Avi Shafran, my old 10th grade Rebbe.  There is a lot he writes in the public arena that I do not agree with, but this one I really did.  I articulated a similar notion in my post in this blog about Maharats HERE.  Indeed when our Maharat here at Bais Abraham…

  • Raising Consciousness about the Agunah Crisis

    This past Sunday  our congregation, Bais Abraham in St. Louis, Missouri, hosted a post-nup signing event with the aim of prompting the whole shul and much of the community to sign the RCA post-nup and to raise consciousness for the plight of Agunot, women chained in a marriage by a recalcitrant husband who refuses to…

  • Of Fish Tacos and Otherness

    I grew up in the 1970’s in one of the only Orthodox Jewish families in a small Connecticut town.  I did not know then that kosher keeping Jews could eat in a restaurant.  I never had eaten in one and the thought of doing so did not even cross my mind.   Once a year we…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • A Hesped (eulogy) for my Mother: Torah and Art a synthesis of worlds

    My mother (hk”m) died last week.  She was a well know artist, committed observant Jew, a deep thinker, and a humble supportive mother.  We are all dying, but to live a life that is dignified, creative, and that brings much insight and light to the world is the goal -and this my mother truly did. …