Words is an archive of the various creative projects that I am working on that are meant to be spoken – plays, stories, poems, speeches, and the occasional joke.
Psalm 28:2 Hear the voice of my supplications when I cry to You for help, When I lift up my hands toward Your holy sanctuary. I had the pleasure of speaking with Adva Chattler, host of Recon Connect, an educational project of Reconstructing Judaism. The format is a short ‘beit midrash’ (study hall) style teaching and I spoke about gesture and hand movements in Jewish life over the course of the last 3,500 years. The video is live on Vimeo….
Author’s note: This short re-telling was developed when I had the wonderful pleasure of being part of a Purim celebration at Brooklyn Bowl with the Phish cover band Uncle Ebenezer and a group of actors from The Rock and Roll Playhouse. A sold-out crowd of 300 plus folks (kudos to Mike and Wendi at Because Jewish!) danced along to the story and watched four costumed actors pantomiming the parts of the King, Vashti, Esther, Haman, and Mordecai. In the city…
Break out the make-up and silicon and send a brave El Salvadoran refugee woman To Mar a Lago (Ha-Birah) And declare a fast day And in the penthouse He will extend his scepter And she will touch his scepter For the sake of her people. (For the sake of her people. I know, disgusting. But that is the story.) And when the lawyer hands her the $120,000 check She will tear it up into 120,000 little pieces And she’ll negotiate…
The Battle Within: What a Story of Twins Tells Us About the Human Psyche Delivered November 21, 2015 Simone and Martin Lipman Scholar in Residence Chapel Hill, North Carolina Eighteen years ago my wife was pregnant and she was feeling a lot of kicking so we went to the hospital for an ultrasound. We did not want to know the gender of our expected child and we told this to our physician. But our physician’s mind lacked stickiness, because when…
A video for Middle School and High School students about birth control in Jewish law.
I begin this post with the above image of Jacob and Esau that I found on the web from the artist David Otto www.davidotto.com. It captures, artistically, one of the questions that the ancient rabbis struggled with in the Midrash – namely, “is the competition between the brothers inherent?” New York Theological Seminary October 29, 2014 Spiritual Lessons from Twins: Jacob and Esau as a Paradigm for Israel and Palestine Seventeen years ago, when…
The Gaza War First the enemy dug under my heart and filled in my arteries with cement. My mind plays back the aerial footage, night-vision, my international center for compassion bombed into a billion bits of dust. Every day I erect protective edges. When the dust clears there is: A hole. And buried under the hole? Missiles. And buried under the missiles? Holes. My ears have been hit by two thousand missiles. The missile…
Sharing the wonderful words of Torah delivered from the pulpit of B’nai Keshet in Montclair, New Jersey by my daughter on the occasion of her bat mitzvah: Listen carefully to this story from the Talmud: Two people are traveling in the wilderness, and only one of them has a canteen of water. There is only a little bit of water and if they split the water they will both die, but if one of them drinks the whole thing, they…