Who is Isaac? The man perpetually trapped by his father’s story, still bound to the altar, forever defined by the core trauma of his life. What will it take to break free? For the once bound to become unbound?

Source sheet: https://ikar.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Isaac_-Bound-and-Unbound-1.pdf

After a life of heartache, two estranged brothers affirmed each other’s humanity,

and rediscovered their own. We, too, can make that choice. Let us push back on the encroaching darkness as a force for good—a light force—that counters the cruelty, racism, and violence poisoning our culture with compassion, tender presence, and forgiveness. This is what solidarity looks like.

Loving your neighbor, who is like you, whose identity you share, is not enough. You must stretch the boundaries of love to wrap into its embrace the stranger, the people in our society who are furthest away from power. To counter the frenzy of rhetoric and the aspirations of policy that demonize these human beings, we need to love them fiercely. We need to love them fully. 

Now we must learn the lesson our ancestor Avram learned:

one day our dreams will be realized. Just not today. And not tomorrow.

And maybe not for many years. But just as hope doesn’t die, dreams don’t die.

The dream we share for America didn’t die because our dream—

the dream of a just and merciful multiracial democracy in which all people live in dignity—

that dream is the right dream. It is the only future…

it’s just now clear that it will take much longer to achieve than any of us had hoped.

There’s an eerie resonance between the Noah narrative and this week. What does Noah's Flood teach us about navigating chaos and coming once more to land?

After the death of a beloved child in our community to suicide, we reaffirm our commitment to combatting shame with tenderhearted love, to meeting one another in the dark, to never giving up on each other. May Benjamin Ellis’s memory be a blessing.

Sermon from Shemini atzeret

Sukkot reflects our people's ancient narrative, balancing the transience of a wandering nation and the fragility of life with our yearning for home and the Eternal Divine. How does our tradition compel us to relate to those who yearn for home, but who are left to wander?

There is a dominant story in America today—a story of isolation, alienation, and narrow-minded extremism, fueled by a deeply unsettling convergence of right- and left-wing antisemitism.

This story—propagated by a would-be authoritarian—plays on our worst instincts: the smallness, the fear, the ever-present sense of scarcity. And it threatens to do untold damage.

We must write something new.

The only way forward is one broken heart next to another, crying together, awakening to the reality that grief is our common bond.