Personal debt in the form of credit cards, student debt, medical debt, enslaves Americans in the same way the starving people during the famine in Torah were enslaved by their debt to Pharaoh. This week in Torah, Joseph reveals his true identity to his brothers, his family is saved from the famine, but not without a compromise. The starving people go into debt in order to eat, as so many are today. Jubilee? Shmita? A release of debt? Many are calling for it now!

Dreams and the way our lives turn out often diverge, something to the point that we are shocked. Miketz is about waking up, losing innocence, and hopefully learning from our experiences. This is true for us as individuals but also for the world as we wake up from this nightmare of a pandemic.

It was Thanksgiving again, and so different from last year’s middle-of-the-pandemic one. Now it was edge-of-the-pandemic, and reintegrating slowly into life with lessons hopefully learned. I was wondering about the circularity of life, a ring I lost and found, Tamar’s story of prostitution and how women have taken care of themselves and each other for eons because the greater society fails to do so. Listen to learn more!

How do our expectations and perceptions change or impact a situation, whether it’s wedding dress shopping with my daughter or Jacob meeting his brother after so many years? Listen to find out.

Women’s agency over their own bodies, Kyle Rittenhouse, racist attacks and trials, the climate summit. They’re all related. And to this week’s Torah reading…Need I explain?

What do Halloween, Jacob and Esau and the Climate Summit in Glasgow have in common? Listen and you’ll find out!

Our culture makes death more difficult and chaotic than it needs to be, but birth and death are on the same continuum. We also have a strong political influence that pits science against religion and spirituality, creating and adding to the chaos in our government, country and world, making a dangerous debate about climate change, as if it were up for debate. In this week’s parsha, there is bargaining and also faith. Listen as I tell the story of my dying cousin and what it has to do with climate disaster, Sarah and the hope for the world.

In our culture, it’s taboo to believe in angels or to talk openly about being “led.” We laugh at the idea of angels because we are intelligent, modern people. In Torah, our matriarch Sarah also laughs. This week’s parsha is chock full of angels. In this episode, I explore what might happen if we suspend belief in our deep beliefs.

In this episode I explore Abraham and Sarah’s use of their power and entitlement and how that contrasts with other ways of using the same, whether we feel “entitled” or not, and how we can be creative about it. I re-tell a beautiful story by Elizabeth Gilbert, famous author of Eat, Pray, Love.

We make mistakes, God makes mistakes, and Noah made the terrible mistake of not speaking up to God when God decides to destroy all life with the flood. Noah is supposed to be the only righteous person of his generation, but…? Faith in God, faith in humanity and faith in our own voice all comes into question.