Ki Tavo 5786 Our Torah portions last week and this week, are amongst my favorites. Last week- Ki Teitzei, “when you go out” and this week, Ki Tavo,”when you come back in”. They offer the Israelites practical instructions for life on the other side of this journey: life as a community, in the land, in covenant with God. Our portion this week asks us to consider what we do with what we have been given— how we will respond when we find ourselves at home, with an abundant harves

I’m so glad to be back on this bimah with you all tonight, after a summer that gave me some time to step away and breathe a little. One of the gifts of that time away was more time to read…there’s that saying, “If you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” And I think there’s a similar phenomenon that happens when you’re a rabbi at this time of year: everything looks like the start of a sermon. So naturally, in addition to some great novels that I gobbled up, I couldn’t

I want to name the dissonance of this moment: looking back on the week gone by, we have witnessed some of the highest heights of human achievement and yearning, side by side with the crassest depths of human behavior. The tone of our public life has felt especially coarse; language from the highest levels of leadership has not only failed to uplift, but has actively degraded. Where a president of the United States can casually threaten to “wipe out” an entire civilization,