Dear Friends, Artifice and illusion. That is what was promised to us, the audience, at a performance which Mikayla and I attended this past Sunday by Sasha Velour (real name: Alexander Steinberg), an American drag queen. Sasha was the winner of Season 9 of the now-mainstream show RuPaul’s Drag Race, and, like many of the […]
Dear Friends, Today will be a very notable day for those of us with school-age children: World Book Day. This is a phenomenon more or less totally new to me. Although World Book Day is a truly international event (originally World Book and Copyright Day), in the UK and Ireland it takes place separately. Of course […]
Dear Friends, Please forgive the missing dispatch last week! I had the privilege of spending a chunk of my half-term with six of our lovely young people in Amsterdam. Together with Yoni Stone and Georgie Friend from Noam, I and a half-dozen of those having their b’nei mitzvah this year explored the Anne Frank House, the […]
Dear Friends, We, as committed Jewish people who like to think of ourselves as modern and open-minded, often repeat the idea that Judaism doesn’t have fundamentalism. Most of us say it with relief in our voice– looking at the Christian Evangelical right in America or the fundamentalist Islam of Salafi terrorists in the Middle East. […]
Dear Friends, Welcome to 2020! The secular new year is of course replete with resolutions– we make these commitments to being better versions of ourselves which more often than not don’t make it to the end of January! However, this year there was a pretty special coincidence with the start of 2020 and the start of […]
Dear Friends, As an American, there’s lots about British culture that I’ve had the pleasure of picking up these last few years. Unique words, different turns of phrase, some unnecessarily complicated spellings, and also whole cultural phenomena which are new to me. One which falls into the last category is the ‘hustings.’ A […]
Dear Friends, “We are part of something greater: a vast web of existence constantly expanding and evolving. When we gaze at the nighttime sky, we can ponder that we are made of elements forged within stars, out of particles born in the big bang […] Beyond any star or galaxy we will ever identify lies the […]
Dear Friends, This week in the Torah, as we zoom in post-Flood onto Abraham and his family, we get a story that, to its first listeners, would have been remarkably strange. Our ancestors who first recorded and told the tales of the Torah were well acquainted with mythological epics about heroes encountering the gods. […]
Dear Friends, I want to begin today with a few, inherently incomplete, ‘thank you’s– Thank you to all of you who joined us and brought your whole selves to the spiritual work of teshuvah over the last ten days. Thank you to all of our service leaders, torah-readers, haftarah-readers, shofar-blowers, chair setter-uppers, handout-printers, childrens service-takers, floor-sweepers, meeters-and-greeters, […]
Dear Friends, It was such a pleasure to see so many of you over Rosh haShanah! Approaching Yom Kippur next week, I want to wish everyone a g’mar ḥatimah tovah– a good conclusion to your sealing in the Book of Life. For those who asked if my Rosh haShanah sermons would be online- you should […]