David Wolpe is the Max Webb Senior Rabbi at Sinai Temple. His most recent book is “David: The Divided Heart” (Yale University Press).
A generation comes and another goes: True enough, but not all generations are alike. Experiences shape some in ways that are unrepeatable. Gil Glazer, Jona Goldrich, Max Webb and Parviz Nazarian are part of a unique generation.
Lance Armstrong proved surprisingly poor at backpedaling. His stone-faced, reluctant regret made many who watched the interview wonder if this was an illness. Why did this man mow down associates, besmirch employees, lie, cheat and bully his way to the top of a sport he is now insouciantly tearing down around him?
At first it is an anguish so deep that it destroys faith in life. We are witnesses to pain and loss so immense that to yearn for a resting place, to find anything good or hopeful or healing, feels like a betrayal. In the face of such tragedy, do we seek out sparks of hope because we are healers or deniers?
Each time I officiate at a marriage, I perpetrate a small fraud. I read the ketubah, the marriage contract, in its original Aramaic and then I read the “translation.\”
Rabbis Daniel Gordis and Rabbi Sharon Brous are both friends of mine, good friends, long time friends.
Every now and then we forbid certain things to certain select individuals: Boxers may not use their fists in casual fights; CIA agents may not write freely of their personal experiences. I think it is time for a new restriction: any mention of Hitler, the Holocaust or gas chambers should be legally forbidden to manifest idiots.
We are grateful that our nation is founded on the highest principles of freedom and resourcefulness and creativity and ever renewed strength. And we understand that those worthy ideals stand alongside the commitment to compassion, to goodness, our sacred covenant to care for those who are bereaved and bereft, who are frightened, who are hungry, who are bewildered and lost, who seek shelter from the cold.
When the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad compares Israel to a cancer, I take it personally.
For nearly two millennia politics was poison for the Jewish people. The principle aim in understanding the machinations of power was to make oppression less onerous. Great swaths of tradition that spoke to the exercise of power lay mostly unexplored. Today there is a resurgence of interest and I would like to highlight three crucial lessons from the anomalous historical experience of Judaism.
Rabbi Isaac Luria, one of the greatest of Jewish mystics, would walk in the hills of 16th century Safed and point out to his students the souls of the dead, often standing on their graves. In the same city at the same time, the great legal scholar Joseph Karo, author of the Shulchan Aruch, the great code of Jewish Law, was composing another book dictated to him by an angel.
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