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

People remember Hillel’s famous statement of the basis of Torah, what you do not want the other one to do you, do not do to the other. People forget that Hillel continued with the instruction: ‘go study [and apply] the rest.’ All these issues require a lifetime of application and wrestling.

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.

Great leadership is not always crowned with success. In order to be a great leader, you have to be willing to fail.

The secular world needs our help to develop healthy limits.

This is the heroic age of the Jewish people, an age of resurrection and rebirth. It is simultaneously an age of awakening and new hope for humanity.

If the principal makes the day school into such a covenantal community—in imitation of God—then the student will experience a dignity that anticipates the Messianic world promised by Judaism and modernity.

So what is the meaning of life?…The Jews faced that question and they concluded that life is a partnership between God and humanity. Life is making sense of this world and improving it and doing tikkun olam (repairing the world) in one’s own time.

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.

In the history of brit, with the passage of time, God intervenes less and less openly, and gives humans more and more freedom. I believe that we are living through the climax of that process. In this era, God does not strike you dead for sin; God does not stop the rain if a people do not obey. Genuine freedom is scary.

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.