From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life

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Shabbat Sermon: Upon 3 Pillars The Teen’s World Stands with Rabbinic Intern Aaron Berc Jan 31, 2025

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Shimon The Righteous would say that the world stands upon three things: upon Torah, upon Avodah - the Temple Service, and upon G’milut Hasadim - acts of loving kindness. Since I am finishing my fifth month working with the teen community here at Temple Emanuel I thought that I would humbly reflect upon three stories that illustrate these three pillars of Jewish life, which point our compass as we continue to establish our teen community.

Talmud Class: Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde's "Have Mercy" Speech Jan 25, 2025

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If you have not already done so, please take a couple of moments to watch this clip of the most famous part of Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde’s sermon at a prayer service this past Tuesday, the day after the inauguration, at the Washington National Cathedral.

In class we will watch this clip together before our study and conversation. Here are some questions we will consider together: What do you think of her message? What does it say about our nation now that Bishop Budde’s message—have mercy—can ignite so much emotion and controversy? How do you think it felt to be Bishop Budde delivering that message in that moment to the new President, to the nation, and to the world? How do Jewish sources help us interpret this moment? Tomorrow we will look at two prophets who speak truth to power: Nathan, who tells King David that he was immoral; and Jeremiah, who is nearly killed by a mob for saying that if the Judaeans do not change their ways, Babylon will destroy the Temple and exile the people. Does speaking truth to power ever work? For those of us who are not prophets and bishops, how does this large question intersect with our daily lives? What is asked of us, now?

Shabbat Sermon: A Lens for Understanding the Ceasefire and Hostage Deal: The Power of "And" with Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz Jan 18, 2025

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For 469 days, ever since October 7, every morning, and every evening, at our daily minyan, we pray for the IDF, that God should guard and protect Israel’s courageous and heroic soldiers. We pray that God return our hostages safely to their families. We say Mourner’s Kaddish as a community, as part of am Yisrael, for Israel’s fallen soldiers.

Occasionally, somebody will ask: how much longer? How much longer will we offer these prayers? No one knows for sure, but the general answer has to be something like: We will keep praying for the IDF for as long as Israel is at war. We will keep praying for the hostages as long as the hostages are stuck in Gaza. And we will keep saying Kaddish as long as soldiers keep dying in combat. Just this week, 5 more IDF soldiers were killed in northern Gaza. If you read the article in the Times of Israel, it just breaks your heart. You see pictures of these five idealistic, noble, beautiful young people. So incredibly, heartbreakingly young: Cpt. Yair Yakov Shushan, 23; Staff Sgt. Yahav Hadar, 20. Staff Sgt. Guy Karmiel, 20; Yoaf Feffer, 19; Aviel Wiseman, 20. Fifteen months later all that young beautiful life snuffed out. How could we not say Kaddish for them?

The larger point is: it is all so murky—and sad. When will it end? How will it end? How will Israel and Israelis be at the end? All so murky.

And then this week, news of the ceasefire and hostage deal. I want to offer three questions. First, what is a lens through which we can see this murky deal in this murky war? Second, when we apply that lens to the facts before us, what do we think, and how does it make us feel? Third, what do we do?

Talmud Class: In All of Egypt, Why Were There Only Two People to Stand Up to the Pharaoh? Jan 18, 2025

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This week we begin the Exodus story which offers humanity a one-two punch. First, a cruel new Pharaoh who demonizes a vulnerable and marginalized minority and commands “all his people, saying: Every boy that is born you shall throw into the Nile, but let every girl live.” Exodus 1-22. In other words, baby-killing is state policy. Infanticide is the law of the land. Second, in the face of such cruelty, in all of Egypt, only two people, Shifrah and Puah, stand up to resist. At most two in a whole land fight against manifest cruelty. The rest of the country went along. Why only two? Where was everybody else? How to explain indifference to manifest immorality? In class we will not only read the story of Shifra and Puah, but also a piece of stunning biblical scholarship by an Israeli scholar named Judy Klitsner which sees the Exodus story as what she calls the “subversive sequel” to the Tower of Babel story in Genesis. Brilliant insight which will leave us thinking: what does all of this mean to us now?

Shabbat Sermon: May the Memory of Our House Be for a Blessing with Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz Jan 11, 2025

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There is a new form of loss in the world, and it is spreading like wildfire.

We know what it is like to lose a person we love. Our mother dies. Our father dies. Our grandparent or sibling or friend dies. There is a Hebrew word for that, and it comes from the Joseph story. After the brothers sold Joseph into slavery, older brother Reuben observes hayeled einenu, Joseph is no more.

And when that happens, the person we love dies and is no more, it is usually sad, sometimes tragic, and always a huge, paradigm-shifting change. The one we love is no more. How will we do life without the one we love? But we are set up for it. Our tradition has equipped us with the rituals that will help us get through it. We have shiva. We have sheloshim. We have minyan. We have kaddish. We have yahrtzeit. We have the words to say and the deeds to do in the comfort of a community that enable us both to mourn our loss and also affirm our life.

But now there is a new form of loss. We don’t have the rituals and traditions and know-how, because we have not seen this epic loss, on this epic scale, before. What happens when it is not a person who is no more, but a house, and all that it contains, that is no more?

The house we grew up in is no more. The house that we wake up in and go to sleep in and do life in is no more. The ketubah on the wall is no more. The artwork gathered over a lifetime of going to art galleries in special places is no more. The Judaica is no more. The challah trays and challah covers, the kiddush cups, the Shabbat candlesticks that are a family heirloom from a beloved departed grandmother is no more. The seder plates, the Elijah cups and Miriam cups, the haggadot are no more. The benchers, the kippot, the tallitot are no more. The kitchen table and the dining room table on which we had 1,000 beautiful meals with our loved ones is no more. The cards and letters and photographs and memories are no more. The relics of our children’s childhood—the macaroni-encrusted pencil holders spray-painted gold that they would give us for Father’s Day and Mother’s Day, are no more. The home is gone. And with it the physical manifestation of the life we used to live is no more.

Multiply that by all the businesses that are no more.

Add to that the synagogue in Pacific Palisades where Elias’s friend and cantorial colleague Ruth works, a 100-year old congregation, that is no more. Thank God the Torah scroll was saved from the wreckage, but the rest of the House of the Lord is no more.

We have members who grew up in Pacific Palisades. They came to the special prayer service for LA we held in the Gann Chapel on Thursday night. Before the service, she showed me on her cell phone what einenu, what is no more, looks like when homes, businesses, and every structure that used to stand is no more. Where a city block used to be, it is no more. Apocalyptic emptiness.

The loss is so enormous. Where do people whose house is no more go to live? What clothes do they wear when their clothes are incinerated? What food do they eat? How do they go to work and do a day of life when their entire foundation has been so cruelly overturned? And that is not even dealing with the deep, deep, super scary, terrifying financial implications. From what I have read, and heard from my family in Los Angeles, most residents who lost their homes do not have insurance that covers a home destroyed by fire. They lost everything. There is no insurance.

What happens now?

Talmud Class: How is it With Your Soul? Jan 11, 2025

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How is it with your soul? In her book on evangelical Christianity, Circle of Hope, Eliza Griswold shares the centrality of that question in helping people understand one another. How is it with your soul? Do I wake up angry and aggrieved, and spend my energy honking the horn, sending flaming emails, taking offense, looking for a fight? Do I wake up feeling grateful for the good in my life? Do I wake up rattled and unsettled or centered and anchored? What shapes our soul? What shapes our inner life? Can we control it? Can we intentionally become less angry, more grateful, less rattled, more serene? Tomorrow morning we will look at the inner life of Joseph and David as they are dying—an abject lesson in how our deeds shape our souls, and how our souls shape our deeds.

Shabbat Sermon: Happy New Year? with Rabbi Michelle Robinson Jan 04, 2025

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January 4, 2025

Talmud Class: It's Not What Happens, it's the Story We Tell Jan 04, 2025

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Earlier in the year, Taffy Brodesser-Akner wrote about her father's friend who was kidnapped at knife-point 50 years ago. It was a powerful piece--both for the thoughtful discussion of this original trauma and its impact on her and on her family friend. But the real story wasn't the kidnapping, nor the way the kidnapping re-ignited memories of her own lived traumas. The real story was that her article inspired countless emails from total strangers who reached out to share their own stories of trauma. Six months after her original article, Taffy published a second reflection titled, "I Published a Story about Trauma. I Heard About Everyone Else's." As humans, we are desperate to share our stories. And, when we tell our stories it doesn't just give us the opportunity to connect, those stories can have a healing affect on our emotional well-being and on the trajectory of our lives. There is a whole school of psychotherapy called narrative theory and practice whereby mental health practitioners help people to process trauma by telling and retelling their story until they find meaning. In this week's Talmud class, we're going to apply narrative theory and practice to the story of Joseph. Joseph's life is full of trauma: he loses his family, is tossed into a pit and sold into slavery, is wrongly accused and imprisoned, and lives the rest of his adult life as an outsider. His story could be a story of loss and trauma, but he reflects a story of hope and connection. He says God brought him to exactly where he needed to be. He gives thanks. How can do this? How can we use the power of stories to metabolize trauma into healing and transformational possibility?

Shabbat Sermon: Living Legacy - It's Complicated with Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz Dec 28, 2024

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One of the most magnetic moments drawing us to shul is the observance of a yahrtzeit, the anniversary of our loved one’s passing, which offers us a precious opportunity to show up again for our beloved departed, to say a few words about them, and to recite Kaddish in their memory. Ordinary people who do not show up at shul all that much the rest of the year show up for their loved one’s yahrtzeit. That is through all the seasons. That is through the snow and the cold and the ice. And they do that for years, for decades, sometimes even remembering their loved one in death far longer than they were blessed to have them in life.

And when somebody comes to mark their loved one’s yahrtzeit, a thing we often say is: may you continue to be your loved one’s living legacy. May your father’s beautiful values live on in you. May your mother’s beautiful values live on in you. We say it. We mean it. It is beautiful and true.

I have been saying it, and I have been receiving it when others say it to me, for many years. But this year, for the first time, I experienced a wrinkle, a complexity, that I had never noticed before. What happens if we and our beloved departed mother or father or grandparent have a real disagreement over a matter of principle? They lived. They died. We know where they stand. Their legacy is now ours. But on a fundamental question of principle, we disagree.

For the first time ten days ago, I felt this tension myself.

Shabbat Sermon: No Finish Line with Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz Dec 21, 2024

Show notes

I have a thought experiment for you. In honor of Hanukkah, which begins Wednesday night, find a photograph of you lighting Hanukkah candles with your family from 25 years ago. Take a good long look at that old photo. How does it make you feel? For many of us, it can be complicated. On the one hand, there is a certain wistful beauty to it. Our children were so young and small and cute. We were so much younger. Our parents were alive, standing with our children, three generations lighting candles. What a blessing. On the other hand, there can be a certain wistful melancholy to it. Our children are grown and gone and out of the house. We don’t see them every day like we used to. Our parents have passed. We were not only younger back then but also healthier. Before the back pain. Before the hip pointer. Back when we used to be able to run and play tennis whenever we wanted and climb up and down stairs without even thinking about it. An old photo is a mixed bag. My late father in love used to say: “There are no happy pictures. There are only pictures of happy memories.” The memories are of course happy. We were blessed to have lit candles with our young children and our beloved parents. But the picture is not entirely happy because in the intervening years we have felt the ravages of time in our body and in our soul. Is there any inoculation against the ravages of time? We cannot stop the worries, stresses and conflicts of daily living. That comes with the human condition. But is there a way to think about our life that minimizes the ravages of time? Our Torah has so much to say here.

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