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

In her annual Yom Kippur letter to her children, Rabbi Becca Weintraub reflects on the creativity children bring to figuring things out and what that can teach us about Judaism.

Also retelling the story of Rabbi Yishmael entering the Holy of Holies and unexpectedly being asked to bless God, Becca explores what happens when the carefully prescribed way of doing something gives way to an encounter no one could have prepared for. Yishmael must respond in his own way, drawing on a blessing that only he can give.

Becca shares that there is no single way to practice Judaism, connect with God, or bring our gifts into the world. Her blessing for her children and for all of us is to hold onto the imagination to say “but maybe,” discover new possibilities when we feel stuck, and remember that each of us has blessings that only we can offer.

What might become possible if we loosen our need to be certain?

In his Yom Kippur morning sermon, Rabbi Alex Braver begins with the ancient ritual of the Kohen Gadol, the High Priest, and an oath intended to ensure that every detail of the holiest service of the year would be performed exactly right.

In a moment filled with purity tests, loyalty oaths, and demands for certainty, he asks whether doubt might instead open us to encounters that surprise us, transform us, and even bring blessing.

On Yom Kippur, perhaps teshuvah begins by putting down some of what we think we know and listening for what might emerge.

What if doubt is not the opposite of faith, but the opening through which transformation becomes possible?

In her Yom Kippur morning sermon, Rabbi Felicia Sol explores two radically different rabbinic visions of the High Priest entering the Holy of Holies. In one, a system built around precision and certainty leaves the High Priest and the elders suspicious of one another and weeping alone. In another, Rabbi Yishmael encounters an unexpected God who calls him by name and asks him for a blessing.

Felicia suggests that doubt can create the spaciousness to imagine God, ourselves, and one another differently. A question creates a “maybe.” A maybe creates possibility. And possibility makes room for change.

Teshuvah begins in that opening between what is and what could be.

In her Kol Nidre sermon, Rabbi Becca Weintraub begins with the exhausting calculations many Jews make about when it feels safe to reveal who we are—and asks what becomes possible when, for these 25 hours, we no longer have to hide.

Through the names Ivrim, B’nai Yisrael, and Yehudim, Becca explores the multiplicity built into Jewish identity itself. An Ivri can stand apart, cross into new territory, and carry hope for what has not yet come into being. Yisrael holds questioning alongside faith. Yehudi joins gratitude with responsibility for ourselves and one another.

Yom Kippur does not ask us to become one thing, she teaches. It asks us to become honest: to uncover ourselves, make room for all that we are, and step into the year ahead whole.

On Kol Nidre, Rabbi Felicia Sol reflected on what happens when fear, shame, polarization, and communal litmus tests pressure us to hide or to reduce Jewish identity to a single story.

Drawing on three ancient names for the Jewish people (Ivri, Yisrael, and Yehudi) Felicia explores the fullness of our inheritance. We are boundary-crossers willing to stand against the tide. We are wrestlers who refuse easy answers and strive toward what is upright. And we are a people called to gratitude, truth, responsibility, and repair.

At a moment when so much is projected onto Jews from the outside and so much is contested within our own community, Yom Kippur asks us to stop hiding and remember who we are, alive in all our complexity, struggle, responsibility, beauty, and possibility.

Rabbi Alex Braver offers a blessing for renewal in all its forms. Some of us enter the new year amid exciting changes; others face new challenges, losses, or absences; and some may feel stuck, longing for change that seems far away.

However we arrive at these Days of Awe, may we meet change with courage, recognize the possibility of newness within ourselves, and make 5787 a year of “good newness.”

In a world increasingly shaped by despair, polarization, and binary thinking, Rabbi Alex Braver asks what Rosh Hashanah, the birthday of humanity, can teach us about reclaiming the fullness of being human.

Drawing on 2,000 years of Jewish teachings about creation, Alex retells the creation story of humanity as a creature intended to be both earthly and heavenly, expansive and contradictory, uniquely created in God’s image and capable of transformation. When the world tries to narrow our choices and flatten us into categories of right and wrong, friend and enemy, our tradition calls us toward something more spacious: imagination, possibility, and the faith that another path can emerge.

Rosh Hashanah invites us to resist “narrow lives” and recover the glorious, complicated mess of what it means to be human.

On Erev Rosh Hashanah, Rabbi Becca Weintraub reflected on the Jewish experience of time not as a straight line or an endless circle, but as a spiral. Each year we return to the same holidays, prayers, rituals, and sacred moments, but we do not return as exactly the same people.

Drawing on Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik’s teaching that we “remember deliberately, anticipate responsibly, and act precisely,” Becca invites us to bring the lessons of our past and our hopes for the future into the choices we make now. Even the round Rosh Hashanah challah can become an image of this spiritual journey: not simply circling back, but spiraling upward.

As we enter 5787, may we return to the places we have been before as people who have changed, and who are still becoming.

In her Rosh Hashanah sermon at the family service, Rabbi Becca Weintraub explores an ancient rabbinic debate over whether human beings should have been created at all, and asks what we might say in humanity’s defense.

Being human is complicated. We can be kind and impatient, generous and selfish, brave and afraid (sometimes all in the same day). But being created betzelem Elohim, in God’s image, means our complexity is not a flaw. It is part of what makes growth and change possible.

Rosh Hashanah gives us another year, another chance to learn, grow, discover more of ourselves, and make the world a little better.

On Erev Rosh Hashanah, 25 years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Rabbi Felicia Sol remembers the nearly 3,000 lives lost and reflects on BJ’s experience of that devastating day and its aftermath.

From trying to reach members and loved ones to gathering for interfaith prayer and supporting first responders, Felicia recalls a city and community forever marked by those 102 minutes, inviting us to hold in memory all those whose lives were taken or irrevocably changed.

Zikhronam livrakha. May their memory be for a blessing.