Rabbi's Musings

More and more people are driving electric cars. I have had one for years. (True confession: when I bought it from my sister-in-law, I thought I was getting a hybrid Chevy Volt. But it is a Chevy Bolt, with no gas engine. In my defense, the V and the B sound similar on the phone.) The car is good for short hauls, but when I need to go more than fifty miles I take Melanie’s gas-powered car. Yes, I suffer from range anxiety. You’re driving...Read more...

One of the books I was reading this past month is a new scholarly work by the great teacher Moshe Halbertal on the subject of doubt. First published in Hebrew, this translation offers great insights into the pragmatic nature of Jewish rabbinic thought. We might also call the Hebrew word for doubt, safek, uncertainty. For two thousand years Jewish legal discourse has addressed the concept of uncertainty in its rulings. For instance, sometimes...Read more...

Remember the story of the aged rabbi, who finally is retiring? A congregant asks him his plans and he says, “I hope to finish my book.” The congregant says, “That’s so nice. What are you writing about?” Answers the rabbi, “You misunderstand. The plan is to finish the book I am reading!”

Summertime is an opportunity for many of us to...Read more...

On Friday night, June 7, CBSW will celebrate its third annual Gay Pride Shabbat. We are honored this year to welcome as a guest speaker, a daughter of CBSW: Rachel (Kachel) Korn.

Kachel is Keshet’s Southwest Education and Training Manager. Keshet is the national Jewish institution promoting LGBTQ+ rights. She is excited to be truly settled in this role, and resettled in Downtown Houston after living in the DFW area with her...Read more...

Mark Twain used to say that when the world came to an end he wanted to be in Cleveland, since everything happens there ten years later than the rest of the world. Poor Cleveland. Of course, if you want to cheat death there is a simpler way. Keeping coming here to synagogue. A major study of church attendance and mortality indicates that people who attend church, synagogue, or their mosque every week live an average of seven years longer than...Read more...

There is an old comedy album my dad used to love to play for us, entitled, “You Don’t Have to Be Jewish.” On the album there is a skit about a Jewish man who is very successful in business. To celebrate, he buys himself a yacht as well as a complete captain’s uniform, including a peaked cap. He goes to his immigrant parents and announces, in all his garb, that he is a captain. His parents reply, “Son, to your mother you’re a...Read more...

In the second installment of The Hunger Games trilogy, there’s a moment when main character Katniss Everdeen’s mentor Haymitch gives her a piece of advice before she enters the arena to fight for her life: 
You just remember who the enemy is. That’s all.

Katniss is a participant in the Hunger Games, in which different “tributes” are forced to fight one another to the death on camera, for the...Read more...

Imagine if Harry Potter’s parents weren’t murdered by Voldemort. Imagine if there were no trauma that began the whole seven-novel story. Harry would be a normal student at Hogwarts. He would presumably be happy. There would be no story but no tragedy either. 

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if Israel, born in 1948, had never needed to fight for her survival since day one, actually even before she declared herself a...Read more...

Some people used to say, “The measure of someone is the size of the thing it takes to get his or her goat.” What do you think? Do you know what it means to get his goat? It refers to the sensitivity of racehorses. According to one historian, racehorses are infamously high-strung. Horse trainers learned many years ago that highly sensitive animals like a stall mate, and a goat is one of the most suitable companions for a racehorse. In...Read more...

“It’s an old man dancing like a chicken and singing,” said the teenage girl, laughing uncontrollably as she watched a video in her bedroom. Her father, a professor named Arthur Brooks, poked his head into her room to see what was going on.

In a second, he figured it out. She was watching rock star Mick Jagger, who turned 81 this year, singing The Rolling Stones’ hit “(I Can’t Get No)...Read more...

It’s getting warmer, so I’m about to get back on my road bike. Actually, there's a newer word emerging among serious bicyclists. It's stravacide, and the "cide" suffix has the same meaning as it does in words like homicide (death caused by a human), suicide (death caused by oneself), fratricide (death caused by a brother), pesticide (death caused to a pest) and the like. The suffix cide means "the act of killing." Therefore strava-cide is...Read more...

I am a collector of corporate slogans. In a few words we can learn so much about a particular organization or at least how it likes to think of itself. For instance,

"All the news that's fit to print" -- the New York Times

"Think different" -- Apple Computer

"The happiest place on earth" -- Disneyland.

My personal favorite is (unofficial) Google's: "Don't be evil!"

Why such a slogan for an Internet...Read more...

Chanukah begins soon and the night certainly feels dark. Can we celebrate Chanukah during this horrific war? Where is the miracle of the light? Too much death and suffering. And yet it is precisely when the night is darkest — short days and small moon — when we need a season of light and hope. We can hope that, as the prophet says this week in our portion, God will prevail not by might, not by power, but by spirit. Of course, these days...Read more...

As I write this, I am sitting in the same hotel on a rainy Monday morning in Jerusalem, at a table — actually the same table — where I sat having breakfast in November 2000 during the beginning of the Second Intifada. Fears of terror then. Fears of terror now. Has nothing changed? Back then, the promise of peace with the Palestinian people — so close — had been snatched away by the Palestinian leadership and the failure for peace...Read more...

One fact that is not to be challenged in the current war is this: Hamas uses children to shield their missiles while Israel uses missiles to protect their children. Some say the situation in the Middle East is quite complicated but on one level I disagree. It is quite simple to diagnose – although not simple to solve. Simply put, a lot of people want to kill Jews in Israel, and if Israel does not act smarter than them, it might just...Read more...