This talk traces Yuval's family’s journey from Basra and Nasiriyah in Iraq to Israel in the 1950s. Through the story of his parents, his childhood in Be’er Sheva’s Dalet neighborhood, a predominantly Mizrahi community, and his father’s work in Gaza during the 1970s and early 1980s, he reflects on the intertwined histories of Jews and Arabs, memory, migration, and belonging. It is both a personal family story and a window into a chapter of Middle Eastern and Israeli history that continues to shape our present.

About Yuval Evri

Yuval Evri is Associate Professor of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies and Marash and Ocuin Chair in Ottoman, Mizrahi, and Sephardic Jewish Studies at Brandeis University. He is a cultural historian specializing in modern Sephardi/Arab-Jewish history. His book, The Return to Al-Andalus: Disputes Over Sephardic Culture and Identity Between Arabic and Hebrew, was published by Magnes Press in 2020. The English edition The Return to Sepharad and the Erasure of al-Andalus, is scheduled for publication by Indiana University Press in Spring 2027.

When the tribes of Gad and Reuben ask to settle east of the Jordan, Moses hears a threat to Israel’s future. Together we’ll discover how the Torah and the Book of Joshua model a framework for the people to remain bound by one covenant while living very different realities. In a time when Israeli and Diaspora Jews face different challenges but share one destiny, we’ll learn what the Torah teaches about belonging, responsibility, and building a Jewish future together.

About Rabbi Kotler

Rabbi Jamie Kotler teaches Torah and Jewish texts at synagogue communities in the Boston area and beyond. She has served as chaplain at Fireman House (Hebrew Senior Life), and has served on the Boards of The Rashi School, and Mayyim Hayyim, and on the building committee for Newbridge on the Charles at Hebrew Senior Life.Rabbi Kotler grew up in Brazil and Mexico, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, with little religious practice or knowledge. She began studying Torah as a young mother of three. Her desire to steep herself in the texts and traditions she had missed as a child led her to enter rabbinical school at the age of 54 and was ordained by the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College in June 2016. Before entering the rabbinate, she was a computer programmer (EDS, TX and Hewlett-Packard, CA), a financial analyst (Advanced Cardiovascular Systems, CA), and a consultant to small businesses.Rabbi Kotler holds a BA in Biology from Brown University and an MBA from Stanford University Graduate School of Business. She is married to Harold Kotler, and together they have five grown children and six grandchildren.

What does it mean to be blessed without knowing it, especially in a period permeated by suffering and perceived meaninglessness? Today, reading these two parashot together yields some incredible insights into how we can reframe our perspectives, cultivate gratitude, and actively build a better reality for ourselves.

About Michael Rosemberg

Michael Rosemberg is a rising senior in the Joint Program between the Columbia University School of General Studies and List College of Jewish Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary. He is pursuing bachelor’s degrees in Economics-Political Science at Columbia and in Jewish Ethics at JTS. His academic interests include political theory, American politics, Jewish pluralism, Jewish theology, and Jewish relations with non-Jews. At Columbia, Michael is a member of the Honor Society of the School of General Studies and the Mu Chapter of Pi Sigma Alpha, the National Political Science Honor Society. At JTS, he is a List College Fellow and will be completing an undergraduate thesis that explores the Latin American Jewish community’s response to the surge in antisemitism following October 7th. He has completed a selective fellowship for promising Jewish leaders in Columbia/Barnard Hillel’s Alexander Jewish Leadership Institute. He has also taken part in the Shalom Hartman Institute’s Jewish Teen Fellowship. Beyond his academic pursuits, Michael is deeply involved in Jewish communal life and leadership. He serves as the co-president of the Challah For Hunger student group at Columbia/Barnard Hillel, and he frequently leads services for various minyanim, most notably leading this past year’s High Holy Day Services at Temple Emanuel. Michael feels humbled and is very grateful for the opportunity to share Torah with all of you.

I need all of you to join me on a sports-nerd journey, for a second, because the Knicks just won their first championship since 1973. I’m aware this may not be the right crowd for this, but my parents are from New York, and as the famous song says, “I was born a Knicks fan, it’s genetic.” To say this championship meant a lot to New York and the Knicks would be an understatement, but what really made this championship so special was not just that the Knicks won, but how they won.

We all love closure. We would all love to know that a danger we had worried about has passed, that we can exhale. All good. All safe. Peace. Nothing to worry about anymore. Open a bottle of wine. Rejoice.

Sometimes that happens. And other times, perhaps most times, it does not.

How do we do life when the closure we wish for is not to be had? That is a question for us in our personal lives. That is certainly a question for Israel and the Jewish people now.

No Israeli commentator or thought leader that I have heard or read believes that the existential threat posed by Iran’s nuclear regime has passed. The war was begun because Iran’s nuclear ambitions and repeatedly stated desire to destroy Israel were an existential threat. The ceasefire that was announced this week does not resolve that existential threat. How do Israelis, and the Jewish people, and all who would oppose nuclear annihilation of a people, do life without closure—with the threat still unresolved?

For our last Talmud class of the year, we are going to examine the tractate Ta’anit, which deals with an existential threat to ancient Israel: drought. No rain meant no water to drink, no water to support vegetation, no produce, no food. Drought meant famine. Drought meant hunger.

How to handle this ancient existential threat to life? Ta’anit, which means fast (as in Yom Kippur) offers us two models for living when we cannot exhale, for life without closure. The threats (drought/famine and Iranian nuclear ambition) are different. But our limited options for living with them are the same.

Singing God’s Words: The Meaning and Experience of Chanting Torah

Drawing from his book, Singing God’s Words: The Performance of Biblical Chant in Contemporary Judaism, the first in-depth study of the meaning and experience of chanting Torah among contemporary American Jews, Rabbi Summit discusses how and why a growing number of American Jews see the chanting of Torah as one of the most authentic expressions of their religious identity.

About Rabbi Jeffrey Summit

Rabbi Jeffrey A. Summit, Ph.D. holds an appointment as Research Professor in the Department of Music and Judaic Studies at Tufts University. He is the author of Singing God’s Words: The Performance of Biblical Chant in Contemporary Judaism (Oxford University Press) and The Lord’s Song in a Strange Land: Music and Identity in Contemporary Jewish Worship (Oxford University Press). His CD Abayudaya: Music from the Jewish People of Uganda (Smithsonian Folkways Recordings) was nominated for a GRAMMY award. His CD with video Delicious Peace: Coffee, Music and Interfaith Harmony in Uganda (Smithsonian Folkways Recordings) was awarded Best World Music CD by the Independent Music Awards. His research and writing focus on music and identity, music and spiritual experience, music and advocacy, and the impact of technology on the transmission of tradition. Rabbi Summit holds emeritus appointments at Tufts as Emeritus Neubauer Executive Director of Tufts Hillel and Emeritus Jewish Chaplain.

The many aspects of the prayer Aleinu

There’s no other prayer in the entire Jewish liturgy as fascinating as the Aleinu with its rich history and meaning on one hand, and melodies and Mi Sinai tunes on the other.

This Shabbat we’ll exam a very ancient prayer that in the Middle Ages caused our people persecution and censorship for the famous line that we no longer recite.

But Aleinu is not just that. It is a prayer we recite with multiple melodies that were written in different centuries by composers with very little in common.

And then, as you know, every evening minyan whether at Shul or at a house of morning congregants join in unison for the recitation of this prayer like no other prayer.

Everyone knows the music…. Why? We’ll examine the concept of what Brain Scientists call  “earworms”.

What is your word cloud? What are the leading words that take in how you feel about your life?

Our reading this week reminds us of the very intimate connection between word and world. The words we speak create the world we live in. Our word cloud becomes us, who we are.

The Israelites’ word cloud: “Why did you take us out of Egypt? We used to eat fish for free in Egypt, cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic. Our gullets are shriveled. Nothing but manna.”

Their negative energy word cloud reinforces and deepens their negative energy world. Our complaints are not costless but spread negative energy to the people in our life. Moses is driven to a meltdown. “I cannot carry all this people by myself, for it is too much for me. If You would deal thus with me, kill me rather, I beg You, and let me see no more of my wretchedness!” There is a straight line from their negative energy this week to their negative energy next week in refusing to enter the promised land. 

But what are we supposed to do with our negative energy if we feel it, especially if we feel it for a good reason, if our negative energy is well earned? What if we are depressed or anxious or worried for good reason? Surely Judaism does not counsel us to repress and suppress hard emotions.

We will look at an old friend, one of the prayers that is most familiar to us, which suffers precisely for its familiarity: Ashrei. The Talmud teaches that if we say Ashrei three times a day, every day, we gain a portion in the world to come. Ashrei is an alphabetical acrostic poem about abundance, blessing, generosity, goodness, radiant positive energy. Say it every day, three times a day, every day, and we begin to feel it.

But is it even possible to offer a positive energy Ashrei word cloud if we feel anxious, depressed, worried?

What is an example of a real person with real worries, eschewing the negative word cloud of the Exodus generation for the positive world view of the psalmist? Can we do that?

I want to talk to you this morning about a pivotal moment, a fork in the road moment, faced by the greatest rabbi who ever lived, Maimonides. And while we are not Maimonides, and we live in a very different time and place, we all face our own version of Maimonides’s moment. His story has so much to teach us.

Please do yourself a favor. Listen to the commencement address that country star Eric Church recently gave at the University of North Carolina. It’s 18 minutes—and very much worth our time.

Church offers that there are what he calls "six strings" to a life well lived. If all six strings are properly tuned, our life can be a beautiful song. If any one of those strings is not properly tuned, the song of our life is off.  We can hear it. The people in our life can hear it, too. Take a good look at the list. What strings of ours need tuning? 

Church observes that the need to tune our strings is never-ending. At every age and stage some string or strings needs our attention. Which makes sense. Faith is an important string, but events like illness, death, and loss rock our faith. Family is an important string, but families are ever-changing. Loved ones die, loved ones are born, people grow up and out. Marriage is an important string, but every marriage has its different chapters. And so on for all the strings.

On Shabbat morning we are going to look at three Jewish values—listening (shema), focusing (kavanah), and returning (teshuvah)—that can bring our strings into attunement.

Church’s commencement address has gone viral because it is artful and true. Matching his six strings with our three Jewish values will add beauty and meaning to our song and our life.