faith
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A curtain of silence drapes the late autumn and first days of winter. There is a sense of expectation. In the solitude of quiet nights, I find hope and the desire for renewal and deepening of faith in the flickering candlelight. I think of these days and nights of contemplation as an invitation to sit
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Tomorrow morning, I will be giving the D’var Torah (a sermon) on Genesis chapters 25:19-28:9. I am honored to have been asked. Below is the text. Derasha: Tol’dot, 22 November 2025 The words of the Torah are like fragments of colored glass pieced together to create a stained-glass window of lives lived and events through
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The other evening, my wife arrived home with bags of groceries from the market that we will donate to a food bank for distribution. An act of kindness. A moral imperative. More importantly, an expression of love and faith. And for my wife and I, it is also an act of remembrance of both those
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The other morning, I found a note in my mailbox from a dear friend. The subject raised for discussion pertained to confession and absolution. This is a timely message as we are in the period of the High Holy Days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. These are ten days of reflection, atonement, and absolution.
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Donald Trump made two statements on Tuesday, August 19th that should give us pause. The first is a social media post. “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing
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What does it mean when someone asks you to pray for them? What does the request say about them and you? Prayer is a topic that we relate to public worship, a liturgy. Our engagement in private and personal prayer is typically an undiscussed topic because it is just that― private. Emotional public appeals for
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Perhaps I have been asking the wrong question. Ben Azzi used to say: “Despise no man and consider nothing impossible for there is no man who does not have his hour and there is nothing that does not have its place” (Aboth IV.3). Despise no person regardless of socio-economic status, gender, gender orientation, race, creed,
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Sun Tzu, Sikong Shu, Dr. Martin Luther King, and Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde A little more than a week ago, I received an angry note telling me that I am a good writer who says nothing unless I am willing to say, “Trump must go now!” Perhaps there is an element of truth in the
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This morning, I awoke feeling as if I were skating on a razor’s edge to the Rolling Stone’s “Sympathy for the Devil.” I distinctly recall one of the last conversations with my father. This took place on an April afternoon shortly before he died in the line of duty with the Oakland, New Jersey, First
Charles van Heck's Woodhull Journal 