eShalom Archive

Friends, Next week is Thanksgiving, and it’s going to be a Thanksgiving unlike any Thanksgiving in our lives. In my family, we do our best to gather on the fourth Thursday of November. Distance and my rabbinic responsibilities often prevent us from gathering as a family for the High Holy Days or Pesach. So, for the […]

By last Monday evening I realized I’d been involved in an interesting series of CBS events that began Thursday night. Thursday evening was the Zoom CBS board meeting; Friday our Zoom Kabbalat Shabbat service; Saturday morning, was our bi-weekly Torah study; Sunday morning was Sunday school; later in the afternoon I was part of a […]

I don’t know if we’ll have a president when this piece appears, though I can say with confidence that our fingernails are all considerably closer to the skin than they were a few days ago. So I thought momentarily to remove ourselves from the fate of our nation and take us back in time and […]

In this week’s Torah portion, Lech Lecha, God commands Abraham and Sarah to leave their home and go to the place “which I shall show you (Genesis 12:1).”  I will make you a blessing, God says.  I’ll make your name great. Kind of vague but certainly promising. This command and promise means that this elderly couple are […]

We have entered the Hebrew month of Heshvan.  Having emerged from the months of Elul and Tishrei, days filled with preparation for and observance of all of those seemingly innumerable High Holy days, Heshvan seems like a respite from a super-abundance of observance the celebration.  So, I asked my rabbi, Rabbi Google, what’s important about Heshvan?  Instantaneously, the […]

I was speaking with a friend of mine, a rabbi out in Santa Monica, doing a wrap up of our experiences of the High Holidays, when we fell upon the subject of midrash. You may know midrash as a relatively small but important body of literature from around the sixth century into the Middle Ages, […]

It begins with the month of Elul, a time we set aside to begin preparing for the High Holy Days. We are invited to hear the blast of the shofar every day leading to Rosh Hashanah, allowing its sound the opportunity to begin centering ourselves on what’s to come. On Rosh Hashanah we gather with […]

(I wrote this column some time ago, as will be clear from the opening paragraph. But its message about Sukkot still fits.  Well, kind of, in that our Covid-colored world limits what we can do in a sukkah this year.  Nonetheless, the theology remains apt.) I was caught in a traffic jam today in the […]

There are a couple of ways to talk about atonement. The first, one of my favorites, is to point out that the English word is a conflation of at-one-ment, and tells us that the goal of atoning is to arrive at a sense of inner wholeness, of peace.  In the Jewish way, you arrive at that […]