Right before Kol Nidrei, we make a startling declaration: we permit ourselves to daven together with the transgressors. Chazal go even further and teach that a communal fast without the sinners of Israel is not considered a true fast.

Why?

Because Yom Kippur is not meant to become a private religious experience. The Navi Yeshayahu tells us that if our fasting causes us to turn inward and stop seeing the hungry, the wandering, and the broken, then we have misunderstood what the day is supposed to accomplish.

In this shiur, delivered in Tomer Devorah, Rav Burg explores the deeper meaning of Yom Kippur as a day when the walls between Jews begin to fall away, culminating in Neilah and the revelation of the Yechidah, the place where we are all one.

At the center is the remarkable story of Rabbi Ronnie Greenwald, who spent much of Yom Kippur sitting in a hotel lobby with a group of struggling young Jews. He did not lecture them or try to win an argument. He simply stayed with them.

He gave them his Yom Kippur.

And in doing so, he may have shown us what Yom Kippur is really about.

What happens when it feels like the door has closed?

Acher hears a Bas Kol say, “Return, wayward children, except for Acher.” Neilah itself is the moment when the gates are closing.

And yet Chazal teach us that this is precisely the moment not to give up.

In this dhmoy, delivered at Mevaseret Mishmar, Rav Burg explores one of the deepest ideas in teshuvah: that even when everything seems sealed, even when a person feels too far gone, there is still a place beyond despair. Teshuvah reaches all the way to the Kisei HaKavod.

Sometimes the gate that seems to be closing is the gate you are meant to keep knocking on.

We often imagine Yom Kippur as a massive cleaning operation. Get rid of the jealousy, anger, shame, and desires we would rather not admit to. Make the house presentable. Then Hashem can come in.

But hachnasas orchim teaches us a different avodah. A host knows how to give a guest a place in his home without giving the guest ownership of the house. What would it mean to relate to the unwanted parts of ourselves in the same way?

In this shiur, delivered at Aish Gesher for Women, Rav Burg explores a more honest approach to teshuvah. Drawing on Avraham Avinu, , the kapparah of a person’s table, and the Kohen Gadol entering the Kodesh HaKodashim, we learn how to invite our parts in and bring our full self to Hashem.

You do not have to clean the house before Hashem comes in. Yom Kippur is the day you let Him into the rooms that still need cleaning.

The Satan has heard the shofar for thousands of years. Why should hearing it once more leave him confused?

In this shiur, delivered at Mevaseret Mishmar, Rav Burg explains that the shofar is not a code he has failed to crack. It is the private language between Hashem and Klal Yisrael—a language that can be heard from the outside but understood only from within the relationship. A prosecutor may know everything we have done and still not know who we are.

Through the tekios demeyushav and tekios deme’umad, the kol pnimi of a shofar inside a shofar, and Hashem’s response to Yishmael—ba’asher hu sham—this shiur explores what the shofar reveals about the deepest place within a Jew. We are not asking Hashem to ignore what we have done. We are asking Him to hear the whole truth: beneath the failures is a child still calling to his Father, a soul that never stopped wanting to come home. And the rachamim that allows us to be heard that way becomes the way we are meant to hear others.

Why does Adam HaRishon hide after he sins—and why, when Hashem confronts him, does he immediately blame Chavah and even Hashem? Because once an aveirah feels like a revelation of who I am, the truth becomes too dangerous to face.

In this shiur, delivered in MMY, Rav Burg explores the difference between guilt and shame, why vidui must be spoken aloud, and why Hashem begins with the gentle question of Ayeka—“Where are you?” Teshuvah does not ask us to despise ourselves. It gives us the safety to take radical responsibility: to name exactly what we did without allowing it to define who we are. The Yamim Noraim ask whether we can stop hiding and tell Hashem the whole truth—the truth about what we have done, while remembering the deeper truth about who we are.

Dating has a strange way of pulling us out of ourselves. Instead of meeting the person across from us, we begin watching ourselves through their eyes: Am I saying the right thing? Do they want me?

The Baal HaTurim finds a remez to Elul in the words אֶת לְבָבְךָ וְאֶת לְבַב—“your heart and a heart.” By leaving out the word זַרְעֶךָ, the identity of that second heart remains open. The pasuk is revealing something about the mysterious way one heart reaches another

Drawing on Rebbe Nachman’s teaching that every person possesses a unique inner nekudah capable of awakening someone else’s heart, this shiur explores why real attraction cannot be manufactured through performance. Sometimes the deepest work of dating is learning to remain inside yourself long enough for another person to actually meet you.

Most of us assume that Yiddishkeit is something being asked of us from the outside. And when it feels difficult, we take that difficulty as proof that it is not really who we are.

But the Torah says something very different: “Ki karov eilecha hadavar me’od”—it is already exceedingly close, in your mouth and in your heart.

In this shiur, delivered in Tomer Devorah, Rav Burg explores the startling idea that Torah is not foreign to the Jewish soul. It may become buried beneath habit, shame, or the noise of the yetzer hara, but buried is not gone. Drawing on the Rambam, Tanya, Maharal, Rav Tzadok, and Rav Kook, we discover why our struggles do not get to define us, why damage is not divorce, and why teshuvah is not about creating a new self. It is about finding our way back to the person we were all along.

This year, the first day of Rosh Hashanah falls on Shabbos, and the shofar will not be blown. For many of us, especially after October 7, that silence feels frightening. If the shofar awakens us and protects the year, why would Chazal ask us to enter Rosh Hashanah without it?

This shiur, delivered to the Chizuk Mission before Rosh Hashana, explores the difference between יום תרועה and זכרון תרועה and what becomes possible when there is no sound coming from outside of us. Drawing on the Rambam, the Yerushalmi, the Bnei Yissaschar, the Mei HaShiloach and Rav Kook, we discover that the longing we feel for Hashem may itself be evidence that the soul has never forgotten Him.

On the first day, we will not hear the shofar. Perhaps the silence is asking us to notice that its cry has been inside us all along.

At this Motzai Shabbos Fabrengen at the Robinson home in Cedharhurst, Chaim Ghoori sang the most beautiful music and Rav Burg shared Divrei Chizuk on Teshuva. Rav Burg speaks at the 18 minute mark and then again at the one hour mark.

Why does the Torah command us to remember Miriam’s aveira? Miriam loved Moshe. She helped raise him, risked her life to save him, and never intended to demean him. Of all the aveiros in Tanach, why must we remember this one?

And why does the Torah describe it in almost exactly the same language it uses for Amalek?

In this shmooze, delivered at the first Mishmar of the year in Mevaseret, Rav Burg explores the deeper root of lashon hara: our tendency to understand another person entirely from within our own experience. Miriam knew what nevuah demanded of her and assumed that it must demand the same of Moshe. She saw what Moshe did, but she did not yet see who Moshe was.

Sometimes lashon hara begins before a word is spoken. It begins when we make another person small enough to fit inside our own frame.

We are all still בַּדֶּרֶךְ—unfinished people, slowly leaving our own Mitzrayim. Another person’s unfinishedness is not permission to define him by what we can presently see. It may be precisely the moment when we are being asked to search for his greatness.

We are all still בַּדֶּרֶךְ—unfinished people, slowly leaving our own Mitzrayim. Another person’s unfinishedness is not permission to define him by what we can presently see. It may be precisely the moment when we are being asked to search for his greatness.