We would be so tempted to read the story of Noah’s Ark as a fairytale. The rain begins to fall. The animals are loaded onto the ark. Following forty days of commotion and chaos, the rain stops. The dove comes back with an olive branch, signaling the start of a...
The high holy day season culminates with Simchat Torah, when we read the final verses of the Torah and immediately start our Torah reading cycle anew. It is – to be clear – my favorite Jewish holiday. I love Simchat Torah. After all of the heaviness of this season, all...
Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur are so meaningful. They are at the heart of the Jewish experience and have been for generations: the liturgy, the music, the call of the shofar, the reflection and introspection we take part in as a community, the solemnity of Yizkor, the grandeur of it...
Joni Mitchell famously sang, ‘they paved paradise and put up a parking lot.’ We at KI didn’t pave paradise, but we did put down a new parking lot in these last few days. Is the rabbi about to make a new parking lot have some kind of Jewish meaning? Is...
This week, like so many parents across the country, we are dropping one of our children off at college. Noa will become a freshman at Adelphi University in New York. She is smart, creative and brave. She is ready. Arguably, she’s more than ready. As for her parents, we are convincing ourselves...
Yesterday our middle son Elijah returned from six weeks in Israel. It was early in the morning when we picked him up but he was full of life and ready to talk my ear off about his life-changing trip. He told me about Shabbat in Jerusalem, hiking up Masada at...
Our Torah portion this week will state: “For what great nation is there that has a god so close at hand as is the Eternal our God whenever we call out?” (Deuteronomy 4:7) The Israelites will experience the closeness of God time and again. God is with them, by their...
KI is all about engagement. Here, we engage with Torah. We engage with Israel. We engage with our past. We engage with hard questions. We engage once and again with each other. These days, there’s a lot with which to engage. Our world is frequently shifting beneath our feet, then...
Everyone’s talking about the Knicks. The Knicks this and the Knicks that. This is their first championship in fifty-three years. They are a comeback story. They are an underdog story. No one picked them. Then they put an entire city on their back and did the impossible. They knocked out...
Our Torah portion this week begins with a manual on lighting the lamps of the first ever synagogue: ‘When you light the lamps, let seven lamps give light at the front… and Aaron did so, lighting the lamps at the front as God commanded… Each lampstand was a hammered work...
