Sermons

We all have bodies. We tend to think of our bodies in binary terms: healthy or sick, able or disabled, fat or thin, normal or abnormal. But as with most binaries, when we look closely at these claims we begin to see how these categories fail to truly capture our selves. I might appear healthy[….]

When I first started to observe shabbat with you all, back in 2018, I mentioned the practice of having two loaves of bread for your shabbat meals. This is a practice called lechem mishneh, and it comes from this very pasuk in today’s parsha [….]

Listen to Rav Blair Nosanwisch give her senior sermon for the Jewish Theological Seminary.

The tabernacle was brand-new. Everyone had contributed some way: they’d sewn something or cooked something, they’d donated money or personal valuables. And then during the opening ceremony fire came down from heaven and landed right on the altar they had built! It was a structure, a power the world had never seen before [….]

Last Monday night, I spent my first night serving as a chaplain, offering spiritual care to people who find themselves for one reason or another, in the hospital. I was on my way to a visit that I expected to be pretty “low key” when I got a page that a patient’s family member was[….]

I know a lot of folks are really going through a lot right now. I have really had you in my mind and heart, and I was thinking of you as I read this week’s parsha. I wanted to let you know that I am going to “go there” with my words today, and though [….]

This past week, we had the first experience of Honi spending his whole day with a nanny.  Phreddy was the one who handed him off and picked him back up, but both of us were receiving texts from the nanny all day long.  One in particular was a video of Honi in the park on […]

When we were in the hospital with Honi this summer, it was very hard for me to wrap my mind around the fact that our son had been created absolutely perfect, his body was created in such a way that he was not going to survive for much longer, AND he had been created at […]

At Hanukkah time we are always talking about miracles – whether of military victory or flames that burned for 8 days rather than one.  We can sometimes forget the smaller miracles that are made visible in the different light that candles cast. Phreddy (my husband) recently reminded me that it is the moonless nights that […]

A friend of mine recently shared with me how ambivalent she felt about the holocaust while she was growing up. Her parents seemed so connected to the tragic stories they would tell her, while she found it difficult to receive them. She considered her parents to be stuck in a rut, digging the same hole […]