Moses said, "I will turn aside to look at this marvelous sight; why doesn't the bush burn up?" When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to look, God called to him out of the bush: "Moses! Moses!" He answered, "Here I am." (Exodus 3:3-4) What did the voice of God sound like to Moses? What does it sound like to us? And how do we know that it is God talking and not a figment of our imagination? Read more...

One of the most moving speeches I have ever heard was a Kol Nidrei appeal of Sherry Miller, a past president of Congregation Eilat. She spoke lovingly of her childhood memories of her Bubbe and Zayde, and of the many beautiful Shabbat meals she enjoyed with them in her youth. Read more...

With the opening of Sefer Sh’mot, the Book of Exodus, the Torah moves from cosmic origins to the role of God in salvation and history. As the Israelites find themselves in a descending spiral of servitude and suffering, their call to God unleashes the ultimate conflict, between the very wellsprings of life and liberation (that we recognize as God) and the embodiment of tyranny and pointlessness epitomized by Pharaoh. Read more...

The Torah recounts that Moses "came to Horeb, the mountain of God. An angel of the Lord appeared to him in a blazing fire out of a bush. He gazed, and there was a bush all aflame, yet the bush was not consumed." Read more...

In many ways, Sefer Sh'mot (the Book of Exodus) is the most Jewish book of the Torah. It begins with the origins of the Jewish People as a nation--newly liberated from Egyptian slavery by the God who created the Universe, led to Mt. Sinai, where that same God established an eternal covenant with the Jewish People. The remainder of Sefer Sh'mot details the content of that covenant in the many mitzvot that comprise Jewish practice and then authorizes the building of a place of worship, the Mishkan (Tabernacle) so that God can dwell amidst the Jews. Read more...