Thanksgiving Expiration Dates – Parshat Tzav 2024

Aristotle was a brilliant philosopher whose ideas about ethics and living the good life are still relevant and taken seriously today. However, his record as a scientist has not held up quite as well. In his book The History of Animals, Aristotle explicitly endorses the idea of “spontaneous generation,” that some living things are born …

What It Means to Be Chosen – Parshat Yitro 2024

Every morning, we recite a ברכה in which we assert a bold claim about the Jewish People: אשר בחר בנו מכל העמים. We insist that G-d chose us from among the peoples of the world. But we are not the only people in the world to make this claim. The Masai people, who mostly live …

Artificial Rabbis? – Parshat Mishpatim 2023

Until the past few months, the term “artificial intelligence,” or AI, for short, was a wonky term only used by academics, techies, and fans of Spielberg’s masterful 2001 movie by that name. By now, however, nearly everyone is familiar with the term. Some of you may have played around with some free-to-use AI programs, such …

Double-Blindness and Double-Hiddeness – Parshat Vayelech 2022

In the first Star Wars movie, Obi Wan Kenobi refers to something called, the “Force,” which he defines as “an energy field created by all living things,” which “surrounds us and penetrates us and “binds the galaxy together.” While this sounds like an innovative science fiction concept, it actually has a lot in common with a theory that …

Longtermism and the Torah – Parshat Va’etchanan 2022

Baruch Hashem, in recent weeks and months, we have been very lucky as a shul community to be able to have kiddush together and to engage in social and educational activities together that we had been missing for a long time during the first year of the pandemic. We can do this because the vaccine …

Horizontal, Vertical, and Virtual Communities – Parshat Noach 2021

A few years ago, Rabbi Pini Dunner pointed out an interesting phenomenon. Despite us now having the technology to literally leave the Earth’s atmosphere and to blast into the heavens, humanity has not lost its obsession with building taller and taller towers. Since its completion in 2010, the tallest building in the world has been …

Freedom and Sacred Space – Parshat Shemot 2021

When I was a kid, it was always awkward when a friend of mine came to my house for the first time. My family had a rule that many people reading this may have grown up with themselves that you had to remove your shoes and leave them by the door when you enter the …

A Remedy for the Plague – Parshat Terumah 2020

In 1947, Albert Camus, one of the most famous fiction writers of the 20th century, published a novel entitled, The Plague. The story takes place in the city of Oran in French Algeria, a large city of hundreds of thousands of people, which until the establishment of Israel included as many as 30,000 Jews. One …

It’s Normal to Be Impure – Parshat Metzora 2019

On Thursday, the State of Israel made international headlines, not because of its election results, but for a different reason. The Jewish State became the seventh nation in the world to successfully approach the moon with its spacecraft. Unfortunately, however, that spacecraft did not safely land on the Moon and is assumed to have crashed on its …

A Tale of Two Sanctuaries – Parshat Vayakhel 2019

Two astronauts landed on Mars, the first time humans had ever set foot on a planet other than Earth. Previous NASA missions had made it clear that there was not nearly enough oxygen on Mars for life to survive. Nonetheless, the astronauts decided they want to test it out for themselves. “Give me the box of matches,” …