Found In Translation: Weekly Divrei Torah and Sermons from the BJ Rabbis and Guest Teachers

What if Avram was already on his way before God ever said, “Lekh Lekha”? In her kavannah on Parashat Lekh Lekha, Rabbi Felicia Sol explores a Hasidic teaching that distinguishes Avram not because he alone experienced a spiritual awakening, but because he kept walking when others stopped. She asks what keeps us from pursuing the visions we once believed in, and what it might take to keep moving toward a promised land even when fear or disappointment make it easier to settle where we are.

How do we hold onto our values when the world refuses to give us simple choices?

In Parashat Lekh Lekha, Rabbi Alex Braver turns to an Avram who is not defined by certainty, but by the challenge of navigating a morally complicated world. Connecting that struggle to the detention of Jews accompanying Palestinian olive growers in the West Bank, including Rabbi Aaron Leven, a BJ Rabbinic Fellowship alumnus, Alex asks how we stay grounded when our loyalties are strained and the path forward feels unclear.

The parashah offers a deeply human Avram, forced to make difficult choices without the comfort of perfect clarity.

What happens when we value the project more than the person? In her Kabbalat Shabbat kavannah on Parashat Noah, Rabbi Becca Weintraub turns to a midrash on the Tower of Babel in which people mourn a fallen brick more than a fallen worker. The story becomes a reminder of a fundamental truth we need again and again. No ideology, ambition, or accomplishment is more important than human life. Shabbat calls us back to that truth and to the sacred worth of every person.

In her D’var Torah on Parashat Noah, Rabbi Felicia Sol examines midrashic and rabbinic texts on the ark to explore what it means to build refuge, enter it, and eventually leave it. She reflects on Shabbat, Torah, and spiritual community as structures that can sustain us through difficult times, while reminding us that we cannot remain inside the ark forever. The purpose of refuge is not only to preserve life, but to prepare us to return to the world and take responsibility for what comes next.

What do we lose when knowledge becomes instant? In her D’var Torah on Parashat Bereshit, BJ Rabbinic Fellow Iliana Brodsky draws a connection between the tree of knowledge and the promise of artificial intelligence. Torah, she suggests, offers a different vision of how human beings are meant to learn. We acquire knowledge through experience, effort, uncertainty, and trying again. The goal is not simply to know more or arrive at the right answer faster, but to remain engaged in the process of being human.

What can a fragile sukkah teach us about what it means to feel held? On the first day of Sukkot, Rabbi Alex Braver contrasts the Torah’s image of the all-encompassing clouds of glory with the vulnerability of the sukkah itself. Precisely because our shelter is never perfect, he suggests, what we create and offer one another becomes all the more precious.

After Yom Kippur, how do we begin living the life we said we want to live? On the second day of Sukkot, Rabbi Becca Weintraub reflects on the physical mitzvot of the holiday (building the sukkah, holding the lulav and etrog, and immersing ourselves in ritual) and asks what practice we might carry with us once the hag is over.

What does it actually mean to do teshuvah? On Shabbat Shuvah, Rabbis Felicia Sol, Alex Braver, and Becca Weintraub together discuss the many ways Jewish tradition imagines the work of return. They remind us that there is no single path into teshuvah and invite us to discover which doorway might help us enter the work this year.

As the gates of Yom Kippur begin to close, how do we turn infinite possibility into choices about how we will actually live?

In his Ne’ilah sermon, Rabbi Alex Braver explores what courage looks like in a moment of profound uncertainty. Drawing on the Torah’s command to “choose life,” a rabbinic parable about paths that wind through thickets and clear ground, and the Israelites’ fear while waiting for Moses at Sinai, he challenges the idea that courage always means choosing quickly and decisively.

Sometimes the braver act is to resist panic, make room for uncertainty, and hold one another through the discomfort of not knowing what comes next. Teshuvah asks us to believe that other choices remain possible and to cultivate the inner strength to recognize them.

As the gates close, Alex calls us toward a quieter, harder kind of courage: the courage to remain open, stay in relationship, and preserve the possibility that something new can still emerge.

Yom Kippur confronts us with mortality so that we might learn how to live.

In her Ne’ilah sermon, Rabbi Felicia Sol reflects on Yom Kippur as a rehearsal for death and on the urgency and clarity that can emerge when we remember that our time is limited. Drawing on Jewish teachings about revelation, multiplicity, and a “heart of many rooms,” she invites us to resist a world organized around certainty and purity tests and instead cultivate hearts spacious enough for disagreement, questions, complexity, and truths larger than any one of us can hold.

And yet, for all the possibilities before us, there is one thing we do not have infinitely: one life.

As the gates close, Felicia calls us to cross a gesher L’hayim, a bridge to truly living with dignity, justice, peace, moral grandeur, spiritual audacity, love, connection, and pride in who we are.