From The Rabbi

This week's Torah portion contains one of my favorite verses: "Let them make Me a sanctuary, that I might dwell among them." The Hebrew could also mean "within them." We build God a sanctuary so that God -- holiness, love, justice -- can dwell within us....

Dear Congregation Beth Israel community, There is nothing quite like the gut-wrenching feeling of emerging from the peace of Shabbat -- a day when some of us avoid the news or social media -- into the news of violence in a synagogue, again.…

Pharaoh's dreams (artist unknown); an oil-lamp chanukiyah. This week we continue the Joseph story. In this installment, Pharaoh has two disturbing dreams. In one dream, seven happy fat cows emerge from the Nile, followed by seven emaciated…

Our Torah stories are the same every year. But as we change and grow, we find new ideas and understandings in the same old stories. In the verses from Toldot that we just heard, Isaac is old and his eyes have grown dim. He is preparing…

Did you know that Shakespeare wrote King Lear while quarantining for possible exposure to the Bubonic plague? Possibly also Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. I assume all of us wrote at least one great masterwork of literature during the…