Home
Welcome
About the Rabbi
Lectures
- Listen
- Read
- Watch
Writing
Archive
Leadership
Contact
- Thanks

Contact

Your Name (required)

Your Email (required)

Subject

Your Message

CONTACT
Thanks

There is an old Yiddish proverb—love is wonderful, but love with noodles is even better. The modern world offered the Jewish people love with noodles. The noodles were unprecedented economic, political and cultural advances for them and for all people. The love was human dignity, equal rights, peace, and the end of war. The remarkable offer proved overwhelmingly irresistible to Jews.

All halachic behaviors are dramatic/mimetic gestures articulating a central metaphor of living. Grasping the metaphor adds depth to action and joy to life.

In my mind, the faith-annihilating Shoah and the faith-renewing restoration of Israel are twinned forever. They ceaselessly wrestle for dominance; just when the message of one appears to be triumphant; it is challenged and even overthrown by the phenomenon of the other in an endless, recurring cycle.

We spend four years—and more—in college to train ourselves for a career…in self-respect and conscience, we must spend at least one year working full-time at becoming a mensch…Only a year of full time student of Torah, deepened by encounter with the holiness and pulsating life of Jerusalem and Israel, can begin to give the inspiration and knowledge of authentic Jewish living to illuminate a lifetime.

Jewish educators must recognize that there is an unprecedented level of impact of the dominant world civilization on all ‘local’ worlds—including ours, the Jewish world…I would argue that the issue of relating the two worlds positively—or creating syntheses that bring out the best in both—is the particular mission of our generation.

The Talmud says every human being should be treated as if they were infinitely valuable. God is not white or black. God is not a Jew or a gentile.

Still I know that although Shabbat does not last all week, I would like to make the world look more like Shabbat. I would like to make the Jewish people a little closer to Shabbat.

What is my mission, what is my shlichut, which God has in mind for me? Unfortunately, there are no neon lights flashing the answer or messages directly from God that tell us what do…each of us must figure the mission out for ourselves, and that task may take a lifetime.

The educational challenge is no longer how one [Jewish] world can reshape itself to be integrated into the other; rather the question is how do the two worlds [Jewish and non-Jewish]—standing side by side—correlate, integrate or confront each other? The time has come for a two-way conversation of equals, not a one-way conversation between a dominant and a minor culture.

Open-ended freedom is frightening. We now know that if there are no limits in a society, the process leads to destruction and mass murder, to a breakdown in values and the unleashing of disintegrative forces.