Jacob's Blessings and Aging Out of People Pleasing

Drawing on the book "(Un)kind: How 'Be Kind' Entrenches Sexism" by Victoria Smith and Ellen Scherr's essay "The Neuroscience of Why You Suddenly Can’t Pretend Anymore," I examine Jacob's deathbed blessings to his sons, which are impartial statements of fact with neither personal commentary nor people-pleasing softening. I see in my own life the draw of middle age to convey factual statements without personal judgment, but the societal messages that everything has to be couched in uplifting, taking-care-of-others'-feelings language or you're a bad person or a bad supervisor.

At the end of Genesis, Joseph centralizes the agricultural system of Egypt, saving the country from collapse due to upcoming years of bad crops (e.g. due to drought), but turning farmers into serfs upon their own land in the process. The Rabbis debate whether Joseph did a good thing or a bad thing to the people. I take two stories from the headlines to take each side of this debate: first, the collapse of American farms due to corporate monopolies (turning American farmers into serfs on their own land), and second, the upcoming collapse of great world cities like Tehran if they refuse to centralize power and exercise eminent domain to enforce collective action.

My Kol Nidrei 2025 Sermon on how our phones are amplifying the centrifugal force of the pull of our individual lives, sacrificing the centripetal force of community, by holding out a fake community, a false version of ourselves (the shadow masquerading as the soul), and building Temples for us to worship the A.I. gods.

This is a revision of a podcast I released several years ago. It focuses on Isaac as the patriarch of Imposter Syndrome. In my own life, I've come to make peace with my own Imposter Syndrome, seeing the anxiety I must live with as a gift that leads me not to shame, but to service. It has made me appreciate Isaac enormously.

I relate the debate from Bereishit Rabbah to This American Life episode 550.

Most of us have been avoiding the painful conversations with friends and family over Gaza. Why? It seems like we have no common frame of reference, and so it hardly seems worth it. In this Rosh Hashanah sermon, I do something a little bizarre: I use Judaism's main halakhic code about war -- Maimonides' codification of all the Torah's statements on war-- to illuminate the war we are at with ourselves. My hope is that it opens us all up a little to each other.

Miracle may be the most misunderstood concept in Judaism. While some Jewish sects officially (like Chabad), and most Jews unofficially, construe "miracles" as supernatural interventions in the nature, as in Christianity, the Jewish tradition tends to understand the word "miracle" (in Biblical Hebrew: "nes") in a far more subtle way. In this sermon, I explain the true meaning of "nes" as "sign" or "that which is risen above the ordinary" to help us deepen our sense of God's presence in our everyday lives, and change our concept of God from a Being within reality to the Being that is Reality.

In this long section of the Torah, where Miriam and Aaron are disciplined by God for challenging Moses, where Moses tries yet again to resign his leadership, where the 70 Elders to help Moshe go ahead and prophesy, but strangely nothing seems to come from it, I am struck by how much the parashah speaks to our time, where the strangest of leaders are getting elected. We learn from Torah that leadership is not just about being prophetic or charismatic or elected, leadership is relational.

Rabbi Irwin Kula reminds us that when we engage deeply with Torah, it can serve "as our mirror" which illuminates our inner complexities, strivings, horizon of significance, so we can better understand ourselves, others, and the world. In this presentation, I note how the Biblical story of Pinchas (who gets his own name on a parashah!) is a little different than most Biblical narratives in that most generate debates that quote textual evidence, but Pinchas usually just has the binary of "you either read it one way or the other." In that, it is our mirror in a more immediate way than usual. I compare the Rabbinic view and legend of Pinchas as the Biblical "Superman" with the recent James Gunn movie, quoting from, among other places, the excellent essay by Will Rahn.

We have grown accustomed to seeing Ethics and Holiness as virtually the same thing. I show that in order to properly understand Heschel's interlocking concepts of Blessing (berakhah), Faith (emunah), Awe (yirah), and Commandedness (Mitzvah), one needs to grasp that Ethics and Holiness are VERY different. This podcast has been edited to remove the Q&A, which sometimes found the material uncomfortable to their sensibilities.