Rebuilding a Fractured Community (Vayakheil-Pikudei 5783)
I Plagiarized This Sermon!! Can you Guess Who Wrote It? (Vayigash 5783)
Rabbi Franklin uses ChatGPT to write a sermon, and discusses the implications for how artificial intelligence will affect the Jewish world and all of humanity
A Tribute to Wonder (Noach 5783)
A discussion of the human capacity to wonder and mark profound moments with blessing.
A Spiritual Home Run (Shabbat Shuva / Vayelech 5783)
What Aaron Judges’s chase for the American League home run record teaches us about the Jewish idea of "teshuvah," a spiritual home run
Together (Shoftim 5782)
The Blessing of Strangeness (Tazria 5782)
How might strangeness be a blessing? Explore how strangeness nurtures curiosity and how being the strange rituals of Judaism might be the thing that makes us most special.
Agency over Emotion (Vayigash 5782)
"We often explain our misery as being caused by another or by some circumstance. Yet while it's hard to realize in moments of crisis and pain, we posses agency over how we feel. We choose the emotions we experience. . . . "
The Torah’s Hardest Math Problem: How Long Was Abram in Haran?, and Why it Matters (Lech Lecha 5782)
How many years was Abram (Abraham) in Charan (The Crossroads)? Here’s why it matters, and what it means when we ourselves find ourselves stuck unable to move forward.
Pharaoh Has No Name (Vaeira 5781)
Why Pharaoh has no name, and a look at Pharaohs in every generation
A Jewish View of Schrodinger’s Cat Paradox (Vayikra 5781)
How can two objective contradictory truths be simultaneously true? Jewish tradition can hold conflicting ideas together as truth, helping us process complex ideas and arguments
The 3 COVID Commandments (Yitro 5781)
Why the Ten Commandments aren’t the greatest set of commandments; what five commandments might have been on Mel Brook’s broken tablets; and 3 commandments for COVID.
Post Traumatic Growth (Erev Rosh HaShanah 5782)
The Japanese art of Kintsugi offers us a beautiful metaphor for how we can use our brokenness not just to make ourselves whole, but elevated from where we once were.
Forgiving Yourself (Kol Nidre 5782)
The hardest person to forgive isn’t the person that wronged you, it’s yourself. An exploration of why we have such a hard time forgiving ourselves when we’ve fallen short of our own expectations.
Grit in the Time of Crisis (Rosh HaShanah 5781)
Grit is the quality that has kept us going through generations of persecution and suffering, and has taught us how to not just weather crisis, but grow from it.
Bringing God Back into Judaism (Rosh HaShanah, 5780)
Let’s bring God back to the forefront of our conversations about spirituality. Explore why we have had trouble discussing God, and why it behooves us to bring God back to the conversation.