From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life

Enjoy our wonderful Rabbi Michelle Robinson's sermon from June 5, 2021

I want to tell you an odd story, not well known. I’ll call it the case of the missing mitzvah. The Hebrew Bible relates two cases when important mitzvot were lost to the Jewish people. Jews just stopped doing them, in one case for 40 years, in the other case for hundreds of years.

We have all been thinking a lot about Israel the last two weeks.  I want to talk to you this morning about an Israel story, and a human story, that you won’t find in the papers.  It is about a kiss. It is a kiss that many of us will give, and many of us will receive, in our lives.  It is a kiss that we about this past Tuesday, on Shavuot, in the Book of Ruth.

From May 22, 2021

Join our wonderful Rabbi Michelle Robinson on May 15, 2021.

From May 15th, 2021.

From May 8th, 2021

Madeline always loved to sing.  As a teenager, she had a gorgeous voice, a two-and-a-half octave range, and the kind of creative artistry that made people swoon.  She and her friends would sing along to Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and Judy Garland, and she took the stage at every wedding and bar mitzvah she could.  In high school, won an adult talent contest at the Adams Theater in Newark. On her way out, comedian Joey Adams told her that she “had a very good voice and…should pursue it.” That dream was tempting....but Madeline’s family was struggling. 

From May 1, 2021

We’ve known this for a while, but suddenly the realization that you only live once has taken on a fierce urgency.  The acronym YOLO, you only live once, was popularized by the rapper Drake in 2013, but as we are emerging from the pandemic YOLO has a new energy as a call to action.  Last week New York Times writer Kevin Roose authored a piece entitled “Welcome to the YOLO economy” about how many millennial workers, as they emerge from the pandemic, want to make real changes to their lives because you only live once.

From April 24th, 2021.

I want to tell you a story about a magic spoon.  The story comes from a different time and place, the 1870s in a town in Romania called Stefanesti, where there was an illustrious Hasidic dynasty.  The most famous of these Hasidic masters was Rabbi Avrohom Mattisyou Friedman, who became the Second Shtefaneshter Rebbe in 1869 and continued for 64 years.  He was considered a hidden tzaddik who could effect miracles.  The most famous of these miracle stories concerns a Hasid who comes to see the Rebbe because his daughter had typhus.  She was desperately ill.  She had very little time left.  Rebbe, only a miracle can save her.  What happens next is told in a history of this Hasidic dynasty:

From April 17th, 2021.

From April 10, 2021

I heard a story on NPR this week that kind of blew my mind. They were talking about how, since the start of the pandemic, requests for plastic surgery procedures have gone up something like 85%. Plastic surgeons shared that they are getting so many more requests that they have had to hire additional people just to field those phone calls. They are working overtime, late into the night, trying to accommodate everyone. And what is so interesting is they are getting requests for procedures that did not used to be so popular. People are looking to tighten their jawlines, adjust their nostrils, tighten their necks, and bodywork as well. And when people reach out, nine out of ten people share that they’re reaching out because of ZOOM. Because now that they’re on ZOOM all day long, they’re looking at their faces and they’re noticing the way they look when they talk, when they interact, when they work.  They’re noticing places they never knew they wanted to improve.