Ikar Los Angeles

What is Joseph's legacy? And what can we learn from the character with the most costume changes in all of the Torah?

Jacob tried to flee from his estranged brother. Did he fear more the battle, or the potential reconciliation? What happens when victimhood is built into our self-definition? What do we lose when we stay at the table, and what might we gain? What will it take for us to understand that there is no future until we see one another? Vayishlah 5785

There is a teaching in Pirkei Avot that says that the mouth of the well was made during the first Shabbat of creation. We have long accepted it to be Miriam's well, but what if it's the well from this week's parsha - the one Jacob encounters after his dream, and where he meets Rachel for the first time? If it's that well, then maybe we, like Jacob, have to find the well, roll off the stone, and discover what exists underneath. 

Who is Isaac? The man perpetually trapped by his father’s story, still bound to the altar, forever defined by the core trauma of his life. What will it take to break free? For the once bound to become unbound? Source sheet: https://ikar.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Isaac_-Bound-and-Unbound-1.pdf

After a life of heartache, two estranged brothers affirmed each other’s humanity, and rediscovered their own. We, too, can make that choice. Let us push back on the encroaching darkness as a force for good—a light force—that counters the cruelty, racism, and violence poisoning our culture with compassion, tender presence, and forgiveness. This is what solidarity looks like.

Loving your neighbor, who is like you, whose identity you share, is not enough. You must stretch the boundaries of love to wrap into its embrace the stranger, the people in our society who are furthest away from power. To counter the frenzy of rhetoric and the aspirations of policy that demonize these human beings, we need to love them fiercely. We need to love them fully. 

Now we must learn the lesson our ancestor Avram learned: one day our dreams will be realized. Just not today. And not tomorrow. And maybe not for many years. But just as hope doesn’t die, dreams don’t die. The dream we share for America didn’t die because our dream— the dream of a just and merciful multiracial democracy in which all people live in dignity— that dream is the right dream. It is the only future… it’s just now clear that it will take much longer to achieve than any of us had hoped.

There’s an eerie resonance between the Noah narrative and this week. What does Noah's Flood teach us about navigating chaos and coming once more to land?

After the death of a beloved child in our community to suicide, we reaffirm our commitment to combatting shame with tenderhearted love, to meeting one another in the dark, to never giving up on each other. May Benjamin Ellis’s memory be a blessing.

Sermon from Shemini atzeret

Sukkot reflects our people's ancient narrative, balancing the transience of a wandering nation and the fragility of life with our yearning for home and the Eternal Divine. How does our tradition compel us to relate to those who yearn for home, but who are left to wander?

There is a dominant story in America today—a story of isolation, alienation, and narrow-minded extremism, fueled by a deeply unsettling convergence of right- and left-wing antisemitism. This story—propagated by a would-be authoritarian—plays on our worst instincts: the smallness, the fear, the ever-present sense of scarcity. And it threatens to do untold damage. We must write something new.

The only way forward is one broken heart next to another, crying together, awakening to the reality that grief is our common bond.

Text study and conversation between Alex Edelman and Rabbi Sharon Brous on the Torah of Joy, and the Power, Promise, and Necessity of Laughter in Dark Times.

Hope doesn’t die, and despair is a privilege we cannot afford.

We think of t'shuvah as a process that begins quietly, internally. We take stock and then we act. But what if we need an external catalyst first? What if we need to return to a physical place in order to encounter ourselves again - a different version of ourselves, different pieces. What can returning to a place surface for us? And what does our tradition show us can come from that journey?

One year after her sister's death, Michal rethinks the Talmudic story of "the oven of achnei" and Moses's final speech to the people to reflect upon the importance of small and private acts.

Vivian Silver (founder of Women Wage Peace, lifelong Israeli-Canadian peace activist and beloved friend to many in our community), was murdered by Hamas on October 7th. Since then, her son, Yonatan Zeigen, has dedicated his life to realizing her vision of peace. Arab Aramin is a Palestinian peace activist whose sister was killed by an Israeli soldier in 2007. The two are members of the Parents Circle – Families Forum, a grassroots organization of Palestinian and Israeli families who have lost immediate family members in the conflict, and who believe that only together can they achieve a sustained peace.