IKAR Podcasts

What does it mean to remain connected to something we love when it disappoints us? How do we hold love, criticism, belonging, and moral involvement in the same hands?

From estrangement to engagement: How small, steadfast acts of love will be the bridge to the healing we need.

Palliative care specialist BJ Miller helps patients and families face illness and death realistically, comfortably, and on their own terms. Miller is cultivating a model for palliative care organizations around the world, and emphasizing healthcare’s quixotic relationship to the inevitability of death. He is a hospice and palliative medicine physician and sees patients and families via telehealth at Mettle Health, a company he co-founded with the aim to provide personalized, holistic consultations for any patient or caregiver who needs help navigating the many practical, emotional and communication issues that come with serious or chronic illness, end of life and disability. Miller’s passion for palliative care stems from personal experience -- a shock sustained while a Princeton undergraduate cost him three limbs and nearly killed him. But his experiences form the foundation of a hard-won empathy for patients who are running out of time.

Let’s Begin at the End: Learning to Live and Love Well Not in Spite of Death, But Because of It. A conversation between Rabbi Sharon Brous and Dr. BJ Miller on Rosh Hashanah II.

"We've tried everything, and we nonetheless fear that it just wasn't enough. Now we are here standing before you with no more plays in the playbook. There's nothing more we can do, and we just hope that you can be satisfied with what we were able to fix and forgive us for the rest. Avinu Malkeinu, show us mercy, answer us, not because we're beyond saving, but because we're trying."

Intro provided by rabbinic intern Jacob Schatz.

Extremism becomes palatable only in the absence of robust moral alternatives. That’s where we come in.

Don't let your life pass you by. It may be that your life is not what you imagined. Grieve what you need to grieve about where you are. And then invest in the life you have and find the beauty in it. 

The High Holyday liturgy is full of images of emptiness and abasement, as if to tell us, “You got nothing.” How does this week’s parashah, always read just before the High Holydays, put itself into conversation with Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur?

Ki Tavo offers a theology of reward and punishment, of cause and effect, but lived experience teaches us that the world does not work so neatly. What becomes possible when we read the parashah forwards and backwards, not only as protest against injustice, but also as a guide to rebuilding a shattered world?

Part genealogical detective story, part gripping history, part

Grab a glass of grape juice or wine and a comfy chair, and join your rabbis for a launch of the season. We’ll cover many of the High Holy Day basics (What can I expect if I’m coming for the first time? Wait, another Amidah? And which service do I wear white to?), along with some of the most perplexing questions of the season (Remind me why we’re doing all this? Why does September feel like a marathon? Is teshuvah really possible?). We’ll do our best to connect, elucidate, and elaborate in 90 minutes or less.