Sukkot is the festival marking our turn from the introspection of Rosh Ha-Shanah and the inner work of Yom Kippur. On this Festival of Booths, we built shelters that are simultaneously frail and resilient, reflecting the existential reality of human life and community. Read more...

Sukkot is a festival of striking beauty and contrasts. For one week each year, we abandon the stolid permanence of our homes and live, instead, in the fragile, temporary structure of sukkot (booths). These booths remind us that we do not truly own our possessions. Things that we hoard and accumulate we will one day pass on to others. They can be lost, or broken, or stolen. The only true possessions we own are deeds of care and service, mitzvot. In that light, this Festival presents an ideal opportunity to reflect on the life of service embodied by the Festival and offered through Torah. Read more...

Last Thanksgiving, my nephew celebrated his Bar Mitzvah.  The morning after, I sat in the hotel suite with my sister doing a quick post mortem, reliving each moment and marveling at just how quickly the weekend had passed.  After months of planning – well, agonizing, over who was coming, what the service would look like, where to have Thanksgiving dinner, what hotel we should all stay in, where to have Shabbat dinner, how to manage serving kiddush lunch in the same room as the service when it would be filled more than to capacity, and all the other details - in a quick flash, it w Read more...

For most of Western thought, when people consider it, they divide thought into two primary categories. There are people who single out logic and reason, and who regard that mode as the core of human identity, as the pinnacle of human achievement, and as the mark of our uniqueness as a species. They hold this form of thinking to be in opposition to emotion, which they view as somehow sliding back into an animal existence and an inferior state of being. Of course, this charge upsets the emotionalists, being that they are - by definition - emotional. Read more...

A few weeks ago I received a package in the mail from Professor Thomas Ord, a Christian theologian who teaches at Northwest Nazarene University in Idaho. He mailed me two of his latest books because he read an article of mine and he thought they would help us launch a conversation. The two books offer an extended argument that the central virtue of Christianity ought to be love - not faith, not salvation, but love. Read more...