I became a rabbi after several years of formal and informal study. My education did not follow the path of a modern university degree, nor was my final examination a collection of standardized questions with simple answers. Instead, the examination was a long and wide-ranging conversation. We moved through the…

Within Judaism, a woman is neither spiritually secondary nor merely an assistant to the religious life of a man. Like a man, she is created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God, and therefore possesses inherent dignity, moral responsibility, and a direct relationship with the Creator. When the Torah describes…

On April 12, 1945, General Dwight D. Eisenhower entered a place for which even years of war had not prepared him. He had seen cities shattered by bombs, fields covered with the wreckage of armies, and young men killed in numbers almost impossible to comprehend. As Supreme Commander of the…

Over time, I have come to believe that one of the greatest challenges facing observant Judaism is the false choice we are so often asked to make. We are told that we must choose between fidelity to Torah and openness toward other Jews. We must either defend traditional Jewish belief…

A personal essay on returning to the necessity of Oral Torah and what it means to me Derekh HaTorah: The Path of Torah I Have Come to Walk My journey toward observant Judaism has not been a straight road. It has been a process of inheritance, questioning, reconstruction, disappointment, rediscovery,…

(Shemot/Exodus 13:17–17:16) Beshalach is one of the most dramatic parashiyot in Shemot. In a single sweep we go from the edge of Egypt to the edge of the sea, from terror to song, from miracle to hunger, from triumph to the first real tests of faith in the wilderness. Beshalach…

There is a particular kind of pain that only Jews seem to know how to inflict on other Jews: the slow, grinding bureaucracy of belonging. Not the healthy kind of “We take covenant seriously,” but the ugly kind of “You are one of us—until you need proof.” We have managed…

I have learned that some of the hardest Torah to live is not the Torah we argue about in theory, but the Torah that stands beside us when we are tired, afraid, and overwhelmed by the noise of the world. Immigration is like that. It is loud and politicized and…

There is a quiet that descends at the beginning of Vayeshev, the kind of quiet that comes not from peace, but from exhaustion. Jacob lowers himself into the land of his father with a sigh older than his bones. After decades of fleeing, wrestling, mourning, and rebuilding, he finally wishes…

There are moments in Torah when time seems to hold its breath. Parashat Vayishlach is made of such moments—quiet, trembling scenes in which a man who has spent his life running finally turns around to face everything he has tried to outrun: his brother, his past, his guilt, and even…