I love the challenge of giving a thought-provoking and soulful speech. In this archive are transcripts from special opportunities when I had the honor to say some words of Torah for a wider community.
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….
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…
Shabbat Shalom. First off, I want to express my gratitude to three men who made it possible for me to wake up in Minnesota. Lon Rosenfeld, who called me in my office in New York and said that I had to come. Rabbi Kravitz, who welcomed me to the bima and to Minnetonka with open arms, and my friend from college Donovan Hart, who let me crash on his sofa. Donovan is not Jewish – but he and his wife…
Rabbi Daniel S. Brenner April 25, 2012 Twenty-two years ago, as a bright-eyed college graduate, I was deciding between studying in a Yeshiva around the corner from my cousins’ house in Crown Heights or going to Suburban Philadelphia, where I knew absolutely no one, but I could study with Art Green at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. I wish that I could say that I wanted to study with Art because of his scholarship in chassdiut. Or that I was enamored…
Here is an excerpt from a recent speech that I gave “installing” a rabbi: When I was young, my favorite book that my parents read to me was Leo Leonni’s Frederick. Lionni was born in Amsterdam, the son of an Italian Jew, and he came to Philadelphia in 1939. He wrote Frederick in 1967. Here is the story: there is a group of field mice and they are all gathering grains and other foodstuffs for the coming winter months. All…
Posting my February 23rd address to the faculty and staff of Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City. To listen click here. Gender Trouble: What We Are Teaching Boys About Being Men and Why It Matters Rabbi Daniel S. Brenner Address to Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion February 23, 2012 First of all, I want to thank Rabbi Shirley Idelson for extending the invitation to be with you today and to thank…
Below is an audio only version of the talk I gave in Charlotte: Going Retro? The Next Generation’s Search for Jewish Authenticity