What does it mean to remain connected to something we love when it disappoints us? How do we hold love, criticism, belonging, and moral involvement in the same hands?

From estrangement to engagement: How small, steadfast acts of love will be the bridge to the healing we need. Kol Nidre 5787

A conversation between Rabbi Sharon Brous and Dr. BJ Miller on Rosh Hashanah II. Co-author of the book A Beginner’s Guide to the End, and palliative care specialist BJ Miller helps patients and families face illness and death realistically, comfortably, and on their own terms. Miller is cultivating a model for palliative care organizations around the world, and emphasizing healthcare’s quixotic relationship to the inevitability of death. He is a hospice and palliative medicine physician and sees patients and families via telehealth at Mettle Health, a company he co-founded with the aim to provide personalized, holistic consultations for any patient or caregiver who needs help navigating the many practical, emotional and communication issues that come with serious or chronic illness, end of life and disability. Miller’s passion for palliative care stems from personal experience — a shock sustained while a Princeton undergraduate cost him three limbs and nearly killed him. But his experiences form the foundation of a hard-won empathy for patients who are running out of time.

Extremism becomes palatable only in the absence of robust moral alternatives. That’s where we come in. Rosh Hashanah I 5787

Don’t let your life pass you by. It may be that your life is not what you imagined. Grieve what you need to grieve about where you are. And then invest in the life you have and find the beauty in it. Erev Rosh Hashanah 5787

The High Holyday liturgy is full of images of emptiness and abasement, as if to tell us, “You got nothing.” How does this week’s parashah, always read just before the High Holydays, put itself into conversation with Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur?

Ki Tavo offers a theology of reward and punishment, of cause and effect, but lived experience teaches us that the world does not work so neatly. What becomes possible when we read the parashah forwards and backwards, not only as protest against injustice, but also as a guide to rebuilding a shattered world?

In On Courage, former White House senior advisor Ami Fields-Meyer offers a deeply reported manual for how ordinary people defy authoritarianism. Written with Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist Julia Angwin and built on original interviews with more than 100 dissidents, activists, and theorists across five continents, the book expands their acclaimed New Yorker essay “So You Want to Be a Dissident?” into a practical case that even under repressive conditions, each of us holds power to help defeat autocrats — at a moment when nearly three out of four people on earth live under authoritarian rule, the highest rate since the late 1970s. Fields-Meyer joins Rabbi Sharon Brous to discuss the people at the heart of the book — a Hong Kong student who risked everything for democracy, a Caracas mother who broke with the movement that raised her, Americans who faced serious risk for dissenting in their own workplaces — and what our tradition asks of us as the walls of history close in.  

I hunger for a leadership with the moral seriousness, the moral imagination to recognize that the greatest achievement is not brute force and military victory, but the embrace and affirmation of human life. Of peace.

What happens when we have the courage to really see what is before us—the blessing, the curse, and everything in between? Re’eh invites us to look up, pay attention, and enter Elul and this season with our eyes and hearts wide open.