Archive for July 2019

The spoken word can be immensely powerful. Our tradition rests on this awareness. Torah was spoken at Sinai and we speak of the ‘oral traditions’ of Judaism. There is no Jewish knowledge or experience without speech. The sermon is an extension of that. Each sermon I create, whether it be formal or informal is a…

I would like you to consider the following two real people, one who is familiar to you and one who probably is not, and whose education and accomplishments are totally different from one another but who share something in common. William Shockley The first comes from the world of electronics. William Shockley was a Nobel…

When Carl Sagan died a couple of years ago, there were lots of stories about him that began to circulate. One of them is very telling. It is said that he kept a postcard near his shaving mirror. The message read: Dear Friend, just a line to let you know that I am alive and…

When we were youngsters, most of us probably had a pet of some kind. And sooner or later it died. Our parents did not want to be callous nor did they want to make us feel bad just because our goldfish passed on, so they allowed us to bury our favorite pet. It is a…

The Associated Press ran a story some time ago of Andre-Francois Raffray. More than thirty years ago at the age of 47, he worked out a real estate deal with a certain Jeanne Calment, who at that time was 90 years old. He would pay her $500 each month until her death so that he…

How many of you here this evening remember your first calculator? When you got it, didn’t you think that it was the world just couldn’t get any better? I remember my family’s first calculator. It was a five function Texas Instruments machine with red numbers, nothing quite as sophisticated as liquid crystal displays, but rather…

In the movie Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, there is a scene where Robin comes to a youth taking aim at the archery target and asks him, “Can you shoot amid distractions?” And just before the boy releases the string, Robin pokes his ear with the feathers of an arrow. The boy’s shot flies way over…

There is a little story about an American Indian who had a phenomenal memory. He had the amazing ability to recall everything he had done in his long life down to the most minute detail. On the Indian’s one hundredth birthday, he was interviewed by a newspaper reporter. The reporter decided to end the interview…

Imagine, if you will, what life would be like without images. We have images for everything. We imagine what our children will be like when they grow up. We imagine what their Bar and Bat Mitzvahs will be like in a few years. We try to see ourselves in different situations before making any kind…

If you were to think of the worst day of your life, what would it be?  There are so many different answers and so many different possible ways of having a terrible experience that the constellation of tzoris is as wide as the world is broad.  In fact, the well of pain seem endless.  I think the…