With the Women’s soccer team losing this week, and all the flack they’ve gotten from the Right, the discourse around gender continues to be challenging, to say the least. Also, I have Covid brain at the moment, meaning my mind is muddled from actual Covid, but it’s really important to be clear when we communicate—and it’s probably the hardest thing we have to do as humans.

R’eih gives us the choice of the blessing or the curse. Whether it’s child rearing, or speaking up when sexual assault or abuse of power occur, the choices we make are never easy. We have to balance them with the society we live in and what we can manage. Here I share my personal experience of choosing unpopular ways of raising my children, and the predictions people made about their future, and offer a parallel with political things happening in the news this week. What are the spiritual lessons wrought by all of this? Shabbat shalom!

Black boys, public pools, drowning, mass incarceration, the death penalty, crusted hearts, stiff necks, and the Parsha.

This week as we commemorate the destruction of the Temple, we mourn. What are we mourning, really? We are experiencing the hottest temperatures this summer on record. What do we do about it? Will prayer bring us where we need to go? God, through Isaiah, has a lot to say about this.

With wildfires sending smoke across the globe, and heat rising to unprecedented levels, can we even escape? What can we learn from the Torah this week?

Recounting just some the magic that happened for me last week at the Kallah conference for Jewish Renewal. Am I worthy? Worth the listen!

Today I explore the idea of magic and how it shows up in the Torah, Judaism and our lives.

I watched a ridiculous Spanish series on Netflix about royalty that I couldn’t tear myself away from. What does this have to do with Korakh’s rebellion? Listen and find out.

I did a wedding on Saturday afternoon, which turned out great, but there was so much talk about what I should wear as the rabbi, it made me crazy. Blazers and trailblazers, assumptions and laws. How do we figure out what’s right while also respecting our traditions? So very complicated, yet so very simple.

I got ahead of myself in Torah last week, but I have a story that fits perfectly with next week’s Parsha, so I’m talking about it anyway. And though the smoke from wildfires of Canada sweeping into the United States feels apocalyptic, that’s not my story, but it sure feels similar after this week from hell.