Watch, Listen, Learn

Unique among all ancient literature, the Torah rejects a world constrained by rigid cause and effect, manifest by honor, affront and appeasement, instead inviting us into a cosmos of freedom and choice, which makes possible apology, forgiveness, and repentance. Noach 5787

The Cornell 57 has reawakened critical conversations around violence, complicity, and the bystander effect. It also reveals the failure of the dominant stories we tell around gender, subjugation, dehumanization. This is an urgent reminder that another world is possible. Parashat Bereishit 5787

Shmini Atzeret 5787 / 10.3.26

The Talmud’s story of a sweltering sukkah illuminates our urgent need for authentically Jewish answers and action as we face the mounting climate crisis.

Rabbi Hannah Jensen’s teaching on Sukkot before the Torah reading on Shabbat.

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

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.

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

One of the central prayers of the High Holy Day liturgy reminds us of the uncertainty we face in the year ahead. But the prayer also offers us ways to maintain equilibrium in the midst of uncertainty. This in turn allows us to be the authors of our own Book of Life. Ha’azinu 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?

What do we do when Torah contains laws that violate our deepest moral commitments? A troubling passage from Parashat Ki Teitzei invites us to wrestle with difficult texts—and to see interpretation not as an escape from tradition, but as our obligation within it. Guest Sermon / Ki Teitzei 5786

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.

From the broken brotherhoods of Genesis to the final conversation between Moses and Aaron, the Torah asks what it truly means to become our brother’s keeper. Through a relationship shaped by speech, silence, conflict, and compassion, a vision emerges of how even fractured relationships can find redemption when truth remains bound to love.

Va’etchanan 5786 In this week’s parsha we read that Moses pleads with God, and the form of that word (va’etchanan) only shows up in one other place in the Torah – with Joseph. What do these two moments come to teach us about yearning for things we may never get? Why is it important that we articulate those desires anyway? *ASL Interpretation for this sermon is available on YouTube.

The book of Deuteronomy has begun, and our people are as numerous as the stars in the sky. But Moses cries out, “Eikhah!” The famous heart-broken “how” that foreshadows the tragedies of Tisha B’Av. What mournful message does Moses see in the stars? And what, instead, can we learn from the dust?

Rabbi Morris Panitz offers a prayer for our country in Lorenzo Salgado Araujo & Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, two men who lost their lives this week at the hands of ICE officers.

What happens when the man who once found refuge forgets the power of mercy? Drawing together Moses’ flight to Midian, the cities of refuge, and one of the Torah’s most difficult passages, we discover an enduring challenge to break the cycle of vengeance before it breaks us.

Senator Reverend Raphael G. Warnock is a transformational voice in Congress and the pastor of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, and for the semiquincentennial of America, he exhorts us to reach for the highest and noblest aspects of our national character. Senator Warnock argues that we suffer not from a paucity of resources but from a poverty of moral imagination.

In this week’s Torah reading we meet a character who is mentioned just once and then vanishes from the story. Who is he, and what does he teach us? And what does all of that have to do with being 13?