Colin Campbell and Rabbi Sharon Brous in conversation on Yom Kippur 5787/2026 (Minhah). Colin Campbell is a writer and director for theater and film. He is the author of Finding the Words: Working Through Profound Loss with Hope and Purpose. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Seraglio, a short film he wrote and directed with his lovely and talented wife, Gail Lerner. He has taught Theater and/or Filmmaking at Chapman University, Loyola Marymount University, Cal Poly Pomona University, and to incarcerated youth through The Unusual Suspects. His one person show titled, Grief: A One Man ShitShow, premiered at the Hollywood Fringe Festival where it won a Best of Broadwater Award. He lives in Los Angeles and sometimes Joshua Tree. Learn more about Mend Collaborative.

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? Yom Kippur 5787

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?