Nov 3, 2026
Election Day (Chayei Sarah)
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(Chayei Sarah)
Rabbi Menachem Creditor
Today is Election Day. Voting is one of the ways we accept responsibility for the world we share. For all the fraught nature of our politics, it is a blessing to live in a country where we can make our voices heard and help shape its future. And from within a Jewish understanding of moral obligation, the ability to make a difference calls us to act.
As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel taught, what is needed is not a leap of faith, but “a leap of action.” If we care about the future, we must do something to help build it.
Chayei Sarah is framed by the deaths of Sarah and Abraham. Between those bookends, Abraham confronts his own mortality and the urgency of ensuring that the next generation has stable footing. He calls upon his trusted servant, traditionally identified as Eliezer, and sends him to find a partner for Isaac. The task follows the binding of Isaac, a story after which the Torah records no further conversation between Abraham and his son. Much has changed. Abraham cannot know exactly what the future will hold, but he knows that he must entrust someone with an essential mission.
When the servant arrives at a well, he prays for guidance. But he does more than ask God to make things turn out well. He specifically names what he is looking for. The woman who offers him water and also draws water for his camels will be the one he understands to be right for Isaac. Rebecca appears. She responds with extraordinary generosity and wonderous strength, drawing water again and again until the camels have had enough. Her kindness is not a vague sentiment. It is expressed through effort, attention, and action.
The servant’s prayer reminds us of a valuable lesson this Election Day: our hopes for the future need clarity. It is not enough to say that we want things to get better. We must be able to name what our communities need, what we expect of those who seek to lead, and how we will hold them accountable.
On Election Day, we are called to choose people we trust with a sacred responsibility: to serve the public. We need leaders who can articulate a vision and a plan, who understand the weight of their mission, and who lead with clarity and kindness. We need leaders who see the whole community and understand that they are sent to serve by the people.
The Jewish community has helped build this country. Our families have served in its armed forces and contributed to every sector of American life. We belong here, and we have both the right and the obligation to participate fully in shaping its future.
If you have not yet voted, please make a plan to do so. If you have already voted, consider whether someone you know needs help getting to the polls.
And let us bless this country with a good next day, and with a future in which no one is targeted for being who they are; where Jews can stand proud, safe, and secure as full participants in American life; and where vulnerable people are not left behind.
That future will take work. May we choose leaders who know that this is their work, and may we never forget that it is our work, too.
Rabbi Menachem Creditor
Today is Election Day. Voting is one of the ways we accept responsibility for the world we share. For all the fraught nature of our politics, it is a blessing to live in a country where we can make our voices heard and help shape its future. And from within a Jewish understanding of moral obligation, the ability to make a difference calls us to act.
As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel taught, what is needed is not a leap of faith, but “a leap of action.” If we care about the future, we must do something to help build it.
Chayei Sarah is framed by the deaths of Sarah and Abraham. Between those bookends, Abraham confronts his own mortality and the urgency of ensuring that the next generation has stable footing. He calls upon his trusted servant, traditionally identified as Eliezer, and sends him to find a partner for Isaac. The task follows the binding of Isaac, a story after which the Torah records no further conversation between Abraham and his son. Much has changed. Abraham cannot know exactly what the future will hold, but he knows that he must entrust someone with an essential mission.
When the servant arrives at a well, he prays for guidance. But he does more than ask God to make things turn out well. He specifically names what he is looking for. The woman who offers him water and also draws water for his camels will be the one he understands to be right for Isaac. Rebecca appears. She responds with extraordinary generosity and wonderous strength, drawing water again and again until the camels have had enough. Her kindness is not a vague sentiment. It is expressed through effort, attention, and action.
The servant’s prayer reminds us of a valuable lesson this Election Day: our hopes for the future need clarity. It is not enough to say that we want things to get better. We must be able to name what our communities need, what we expect of those who seek to lead, and how we will hold them accountable.
On Election Day, we are called to choose people we trust with a sacred responsibility: to serve the public. We need leaders who can articulate a vision and a plan, who understand the weight of their mission, and who lead with clarity and kindness. We need leaders who see the whole community and understand that they are sent to serve by the people.
The Jewish community has helped build this country. Our families have served in its armed forces and contributed to every sector of American life. We belong here, and we have both the right and the obligation to participate fully in shaping its future.
If you have not yet voted, please make a plan to do so. If you have already voted, consider whether someone you know needs help getting to the polls.
And let us bless this country with a good next day, and with a future in which no one is targeted for being who they are; where Jews can stand proud, safe, and secure as full participants in American life; and where vulnerable people are not left behind.
That future will take work. May we choose leaders who know that this is their work, and may we never forget that it is our work, too.
Nov 2, 2026
To Belong and to Bless (Chayei Sarah)
To Belong and to Bless (Chayei Sarah)
Rabba Daphne Lazar Price and Rabbi Menachem Creditor
Parashat Chayei Sarah, “the life of Sarah,” begins with her death. Abraham mourns and weeps for his beloved, and then, in his grief, confronts a practical need: he must find a place to bury her. Until this moment, Abraham and Sarah had lived in the land without owning a piece of it. Now he approaches the Hittites and describes himself in language that holds a profound tension:
“...Ger v’toshav anochi imachem, I am a stranger and a resident among you. (Gen. 23:4)”
How can one be both?
A ger is a newcomer, someone who doesn’t quite belong, and as such, lacks agency. A toshav is a resident, someone rooted in a place. Abraham stands between these identities. He has journeyed to this land in response to God’s call, he has not yet acquired property and so he must ask its inhabitants for a place in which to honor his dead wife.
His vulnerability is unmistakable. He is grieving Sarah, negotiating with his neighbors, and seeking a measure of permanence in a place where he remains, in some sense, a stranger. And the tension does not end with Abraham. His grandson Jacob would later seek to settle in the land where his ancestors had but sojourned (Gen. 37:1). Rashi imagines Jacob longing for a measure of tranquility, only to discover that peace is not so easily secured.
Who among us does not recognize that longing? Every human being deserves a place to live without trembling, a place to put down roots, to love, to mourn, and to hope. For Jews, the journey toward such belonging has often been marked by displacement and danger. Modern Zionism emerged from the recognition that Jewish safety and self-determination could not depend solely on the goodwill of others. Jewish power became necessary because Jewish vulnerability had become unbearable. And yet, as Rabbi Yitz Greenberg teaches, power brings its own moral challenge. We need the power to choose life and protect life. We must also ask ourselves, honestly and continually, how we exercise that power (“Judaism and the Ethics of Power,” 1999).
Abraham offers a model worth considering. God has promised the land to his descendants, but Abraham does not seize the burial place or wait for a miracle. He negotiates with Ephron and pays for the field and its cave. He acts to meet his family’s need while engaging the people among whom he lives. His purchase does not resolve every question about land, promise, or power. It does suggest that even deeply held commitments call for responsibility toward others. Faith can move us to act, and the way we act matters.
The Cave of Machpelah, where Sarah is buried, as are Abraham, Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob and Leah, remains a place of profound holiness and painful history. Hebron has witnessed terrible violence, including the massacre of Jews in 1929 and the murder of Muslim worshippers by a Jewish extremist in 1994. To honor our ancestors there, we must also confront the human cost of hatred and the desecration caused when violence is clothed in religious language.
Our tradition calls us to hold fast to Jewish belonging and to moral accountability. These commitments require us to keep asking how we can protect life, exercise power with restraint, and leave room for the humanity of others.
Perhaps that work begins in our own personal relationships. In a time when political differences can fracture families and friendships, we can promise one another that our relationships will not be conditional on agreement. Torah is larger than any one of us, and we need one another to hear its many truths.
May we move through the world with care, courage, and the best intentions. May we act with humility when the way forward is difficult. And may we leave our children a world more rooted in life, justice, and peace than the one we inherited.
Oct 30, 2026
Oct 28, 2026
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Oct 23, 2026
One Person. People. (Lech Lecha)
One Person. People. (Lech Lecha)
Rabbi Menachem CreditorLech Lecha is the moment when humanity’s story becomes a summons addressed to one person.
Even a letter can mark that turning. Commenting on the final nun of "Charan," the place where Abram’s father Terach dies, Rashi describes an inverted letter and connects it with the divine anger preceding Abram, limited to the previous chapters by the implied visual bracket. (It is fascinating that we no longer have that tradition in the way scribes write Torahs today.) I hear in that remembered calligraphic nuance an invitation to imagine a world turning toward a new possibility.
The Torah marks a pivotal moment. God calls one person. A People’s journey begins.
What might it mean to mark our moment, hear that call ourselves, and see our individual decisions as impacting others?
Our collective future depends upon individual acts of responsibility. Before we ask what our People will become, each of us must choose how to live into our next moments.
May our decisions carry forward the life entrusted to us through Avram and Sarai.
Let it begin with me. Let it begin with you.
Oct 22, 2026
A Faith Spacious Enough for Wonder (Lech Lecha)
A Faith Spacious Enough for Wonder (Lech Lecha)
Rabbi Menachem Creditor
Sometimes the Torah we remember contains stories the Torah never tells. We have heard them so often that they become inseparable from the text itself.
Consider Abram smashing his father’s idols. Terah leaves his son tending the shop. Abram shatters the statues, places the weapon in the largest idol’s hand, and tells his father that the gods fought among themselves. Terah protests: these objects cannot act! Abram’s response exposes the contradiction: Why, then, worship them?
It is a magnificent story. It is also not found in the biblical text. It is midrash, the magnificent imaginative project of the rabbis of old and of today.
Parashat Lech Lecha begins with God calling Abram to leave his homeland. The Torah offers no explanation for his selection. Our rabbis enter that silence with a story about someone willing to challenge inherited assumptions. Before Abram journeys, the midrash imagines him journeying beyond the boundaries of his father’s imagination.
But what happens when the descendants of an idol smasher turn his legacy into something immovable?
In "Open Closed Open," the great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai z"l reminds us:
"We are all children of Abraham
But also the grandchildren of Terah, Abraham's father.
And maybe it's high time the grandchildren
Did unto their father as he did unto his,
When he shattered his idols and images, his religion, his faith.
That too would be the beginning of a new religion."
Amichai's poetic midrash is unsettling in all the right ways.
We can become so protective of our stories that we forget what they seek to express. We can mistake a clear formulation for God's Dream. We can hold an established understanding so tightly that there is no room left for wonder, growth, or another human being.
Idols need not be carved from stone. Certainty can become an idol.
We need not seek a new religion. This one, our precious Jewish tradition, its texts, its obligations, its stubborn insistence that life can become more holy, is a treasure beyond measure. This calls us to remain curious about what our ancestors handed down and courageous about what we must carry forward.
Our rabbis received Torah and responded imaginatively to its silences. Their fidelity included the willingness to create.
Lech Lecha demands the same: to recognize when familiar forms have narrowed our sense of what is possible, and to begin moving again.
We are descendants of Abram and Sarai. Our inheritance includes the courage to leave familiar ground.
May we teach and live a Torah spacious enough for that journey with the Divine.
Oct 21, 2026
The Courage to Keep Listening: a reflection on Billy Planer's "Conversations that Matter"
The Courage to Keep Listening
There is a particular loneliness in being certain that no one is listening. We can fill our days with words, publish our convictions, gather affirmations, and still feel that we have reached no one beyond those who already agree. Meanwhile, the distance between us grows.
My friend Billy Planer has spent decades walking into that distance. His book, "Conversations That Matter," invites us to join him.
Drawing on his work leading Etgar 36 journeys through American history and contemporary life, Billy introduces us to people whose stories complicate the categories we carry. His educational method asks participants to encounter human beings, listen to how their convictions developed, and notice what happens within themselves when someone refuses to fit a familiar outline.
That matters so very much. We often imagine listening as something we offer another person. Billy reminds us how much it requires of the listener. Can I recognize the moment when curiosity gives way to preparing my rebuttal? Can I ask a question whose answer I have not already decided? Can I tolerate the discomfort of discovering that someone I disagree with has something to teach me?
These are deeply spiritual questions. They concern the habits through which we become human together.
As a rabbi, I hear in Billy’s work an echo of the Jewish insistence that every person bears God's Image. That teaching becomes demanding precisely when someone’s words anger us. Recognizing another person’s humanity can require tremendous discipline when the stakes of a disagreement are real and our own wounds are close to the surface.
I also appreciate that Billy makes room for boundaries. Conversation requires willingness. Safety matters. Sometimes stepping away is wise. The invitation to listen carries weight because it leaves room for judgment about when an encounter is possible.
His practical guidance gives that invitation substance: speak from your own experience, ask sincere questions, pay attention to your posture and tone, allow mistakes, and release the need to win. Anyone who has attempted these things during a painful disagreement knows how much practice they require. Even taking a breath before answering can become an act of moral courage.
I found myself especially moved by the role of story in his approach. An argument can become abstract very quickly. A story asks us to picture a life. It gives a belief a history, a geography, a family, a wound. We may remain unconvinced. Yet we have encountered someone whose existence exceeds the position we oppose.
For those of us committed to public leadership, this is a necessary challenge. Our words shape the rooms others must inhabit. We bear responsibility for what we defend, how we speak, and whether people leave our presence more capable of encountering one another. Passion and humility belong together. So do conviction and curiosity.
Billy’s book leaves me thinking about the world we build through ordinary exchanges: the question asked without a trap inside it, the moment of restraint, the unexpected admission, the willingness to remain present. These gestures can prepare people for the sustained work that change demands.
On December 6, I will have the pleasure of joining Billy for a public conversation in Westchester about Conversations That Matter. I am grateful to call him my friend and eager to explore these questions together. You can find event information at https://billyplaner.com/events/. You can purchase your own copy of the book here: https://a.co/d/0cLbC37Z
I hope you will join us. Billy has given us a generous invitation to practice something our communities urgently need: the courage to listen closely enough that another person becomes more fully visible. We can begin with the next conversation, carrying our convictions, making room for surprise, and remembering that the person before us has a story.
Oct 16, 2026
What Good is an Ark When We Leave the Children Outside? For Bend, Oregon During Parashat Noach
What Good is an Ark When We Leave the Children Outside?
For Bend, Oregon During Parashat Noach
For Bend, Oregon During Parashat Noach
Rabbi Menachem Creditor
I woke to rain this morning. During the week of Parashat Noach, rain asks us to listen. But the flood demanding our attention is one we have made.
At Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, Oregon, three children, ages five, eight, and eleven, and a teacher were murdered. Children who should have come home. A teacher who should have returned to a life. Families whose worlds have been shattered.
How can we read the story of the flood and imagine it is only a story? Torah introduces Noah as righteous “in his generation.” What does righteousness require in ours? Noah sheltered his family while the world drowned. Can we call ourselves righteous if we protect our own children while accepting that someone else’s classroom might become a killing field?
Our ark must provide safety for every child and every teacher. Unlike the biblical flood, this devastation is sustained by human choices: easy access to deadly weapons, political cowardice, and a culture that confuses reverence for guns with freedom. We cannot surrender to its recurrence.
We must demand laws that protect life - and leaders willing to enact them.
After the flood, God places a rainbow in the sky and promises never again to destroy the world this way. As Rabbi Tali Adler teaches, this means there will be no reboot. This is the world entrusted to us. These are the children we are blessed to love. There is no replacement for any one of them.
Later in the portion, humanity builds the Tower of Babel. But they build a tower in a valley. I wonder whether we, too, keep constructing shallow assurances where the waters will still rise.
Prayers offered without responsibility cannot provide the shelter our children deserve. Prayer must move our hands. Grief must move our feet. Love must shape our laws.
May the memories of those murdered in Bend be blessings.
May their families know tenderness and companionship. May the wounded find healing.
And may we stop asking American children to practice surviving what American adults refuse to prevent.
The rainbow is a covenant. Our answer must be the world we build beneath it, together, beginning now.
Oct 15, 2026
Oct 13, 2026
Oct 7, 2026
A Prayer for October 7, Three Years Later
A Prayer for October 7, Three Years Later
Rabbi Menachem CreditorHealer of Shattered Souls,
we ask that You notice us
and all those who have promised
to bear testimony
to unspeakable horrors.
The indelible marks with which
these images and sounds
have scarred us to our cores
are permanent.
We will never
unsee nor unhear
any of what we saw, felt, experienced.
We accept this terrible imperative.
We bear witness
to honor the dead
Women
Men
Boys
Girls
Grandmothers
Grandfathers
Whole families
Babies
whose bodies were violated
whose very humanity was denied.
We affirm,
through this sacred witnessing,
that they were in fact
human beings,
created in Your Image,
worthy of infinite dignity.
We affirm,
through the three years
since That Day,
the weight of it all
upon Survivors
upon bereft families
upon kibbutzim and towns
upon Medinat Yisrael and Am Yisrael
upon us all.
Yes, we have proven our capacities
for healing
for rebuilding
for loving.
But today we call out
against the terrible reality that tested us in the first place.
God,
Who has Witnessed
all of this for all time,
we beg You send Divine Warmth
to reanimate us
when our eyes
are full of this darkness,
to somehow reinflate our souls
when breathing feels labored, or even wrong.
Remind us to fight for joy,
for that is what the souls
we remember today deserved,
what those who were trapped underground
we tenderly hold today always deserved,
what the Jewish People deserves,
what every human being deserves.
May the memories of our martyrs be forever blessed.
May Am Yisrael, the Jewish People,
heal and rebuild and find heart once again.
Sep 28, 2026
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Sep 22, 2026
**CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS** Da’at HaKahal: A High Holidays Sermon Anthology 5787/2026
**CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS**
Da’at HaKahal: A High Holidays Sermon Anthology 5787/2026
edited by Rabbi Menachem Creditor
ALL SUBMISSIONS MUST BE SUBMITTED BY SEPTEMBER 25 in WORD (.DOCX) FORM with the Author's BIO to torahwithin@gmail.com.
We Build the Shelter - in honor of the dedication of the new home for Queens Hillel!
We Build the Shelter
Rabbi Menachem Creditor
in honor of the dedication of the new home for Queens Hillel
On Yom Kippur evening, gunfire erupted outside Sons of Jacob Synagogue in Belleville, Ontario. A police officer stationed outside the synagogue was seriously wounded while protecting a community at prayer; thank God, those gathered inside were unharmed. The violence itself lands with terrible familiarity. We pray for Constable Jeff Smith’s complete healing, for his family, and for the whole Belleville Jewish community. The day after Yom Kippur, we recommit to building and rebuilding.
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There is a beautiful Jewish custom to begin constructing the sukkah as soon as the fast has ended. We do not linger too long in the grandeur of our prayers, even prayers of repentance and hope. We take up wood, walls, branches, and tools. We build.
This year, the day after Yom Kippur I find myself at the dedication of the new Queens Hillel House: a home for Jewish students, a center for learning, friendship, service, and strength. My daughter graduated from Queens College, and some of her artwork now adorns its walls. To stand there, preparing to affix a mezuzah and dedicate a new communal home, was to witness something deeply Jewish: after the vulnerability of Yom Kippur, we build a place of belonging.
Throughout this season, we recite Psalm 27: “For God will shelter me in God’s sukkah on a day of trouble.” It is a tender promise. We pray for protection. We pray for a world in which no one has to fear entering a synagogue, a school, a campus building, or a home.
But Sukkot teaches that shelter is not only something we request from Heaven. It is something we are called to create with our own hands.
A sukkah is deliberately fragile. Its roof lets us see the sky. Its walls do not pretend that danger does not exist. And yet we enter it, eat in it, sing in it, welcome guests into it. We declare that fragility need not become paralysis. We can answer uncertainty by building communities of care, learning, courage, and joy.
Especially for our young people, we must build. We must build Jewish spaces that are nourishing and proud; spaces that refuse hatred without becoming defined by it; spaces that stand in solidarity against hatred aimed at any community, and that speak clearly when it is aimed at ours.
May this Sukkot bring healing to those wounded, strength to those protecting others, and courage to all who build homes for holiness.
Yes, we ask God to shelter us. And then, together, we build the shelter with our own hearts and arms.
Sep 18, 2026
Sep 17, 2026
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Sep 6, 2026
Ed Sheeran Owes His Fans an Apology
Ed Sheeran Owes His Fans an Apology.png)
At MetLife Stadium this past weekend, Benjamin Hammond Haggerty, otherwise known as Macklemore, did not merely perform as one of Ed Sheeran’s opening acts. He used a vast stage, in front of tens of thousands of people gathered for Sheeran’s concert, to lead chants of “Free Palestine,” perform “Hind’s Hall,” and project graphic images from Gaza and pro-Palestinian demonstrations across the screens. Jewish and Israeli attendees did not purchase tickets for a political rally against Israel. They came to hear music. Instead, many were blindsided by a spectacle that made their presence feel unwelcome and their grief irrelevant. Reporting on the event makes clear how deliberate and public the moment was.
Ed Sheeran cannot plausibly treat this as someone else’s problem.
Macklemore was on Sheeran’s tour and on Sheeran’s stage. His performance was not an unscripted remark in a hallway or an aside at a private gathering. It was a centerpiece of a professionally produced stadium set, with visual accompaniment, microphones, screens, lighting, and the authority granted by an international superstar’s platform. Whatever Sheeran personally believes about Israel, Gaza, or the war, allowing this performance to occur without public correction amounts to implicit endorsement.
And he could not reasonably have been unaware of what was unfolding. The screens were enormous. The crowd response was audible. The political content was the point of the set. A headliner who profits from an arena-scale production also bears responsibility for what that production communicates to the people who bought tickets.
There is a painful irony here. Sheeran’s own work has repeatedly appealed to tenderness and emotional responsibility. In “Be Kind,” which he co-wrote, he sings, “I don’t wanna see you cry,” because “people can be so cold.” Those are simple words, but they name something morally serious: our actions have consequences for other human beings, and decency requires attention to the pain we might cause.
That standard should apply here.
Macklemore’s activism has long moved beyond a general concern for Palestinian civilians, whose suffering is real and whose dignity matters. He has made Israel into a singular moral villain, mobilizing audiences with rhetoric and imagery that erase Israeli grief, Jewish trauma, Hamas’s brutality, and the actual complexity of a devastating war. To invite that message into a concert without warning, especially in the New York area, where so many Jews have deep family, communal, and personal ties to Israel, was reckless.
It is also worth saying plainly that criticism of an Israeli government is not the same thing as creating a public atmosphere in which Jewish concertgoers are asked to absorb mass political hostility toward the Jewish state as the price of enjoying an evening of music. Jewish safety and belonging are not conditional on silence about Israel. Nor is concern for Palestinian life strengthened by treating Jewish attachment to Israel as something inherently shameful or disposable.
Sheeran has built a career on songs that ask listeners to care for one another across heartbreak, loneliness, and loss. But care cannot remain merely lyrical. It has to show up in judgment, in accountability, and in the willingness to recognize when one’s platform has caused harm.
He should apologize to the fans who felt ambushed at MetLife Stadium. He should acknowledge that Macklemore’s set crossed a line from artistic expression into political agitation on a stage that Sheeran controlled. And he should make clear that future audiences will not be placed in the same position.
“I don’t wanna see you cry” is a beautiful sentiment. Now it is time for Ed Sheeran to live up to it.
Rabbi Menachem Creditor
September 6, 2026
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At MetLife Stadium this past weekend, Benjamin Hammond Haggerty, otherwise known as Macklemore, did not merely perform as one of Ed Sheeran’s opening acts. He used a vast stage, in front of tens of thousands of people gathered for Sheeran’s concert, to lead chants of “Free Palestine,” perform “Hind’s Hall,” and project graphic images from Gaza and pro-Palestinian demonstrations across the screens. Jewish and Israeli attendees did not purchase tickets for a political rally against Israel. They came to hear music. Instead, many were blindsided by a spectacle that made their presence feel unwelcome and their grief irrelevant. Reporting on the event makes clear how deliberate and public the moment was.
Ed Sheeran cannot plausibly treat this as someone else’s problem.
Macklemore was on Sheeran’s tour and on Sheeran’s stage. His performance was not an unscripted remark in a hallway or an aside at a private gathering. It was a centerpiece of a professionally produced stadium set, with visual accompaniment, microphones, screens, lighting, and the authority granted by an international superstar’s platform. Whatever Sheeran personally believes about Israel, Gaza, or the war, allowing this performance to occur without public correction amounts to implicit endorsement.
And he could not reasonably have been unaware of what was unfolding. The screens were enormous. The crowd response was audible. The political content was the point of the set. A headliner who profits from an arena-scale production also bears responsibility for what that production communicates to the people who bought tickets.
There is a painful irony here. Sheeran’s own work has repeatedly appealed to tenderness and emotional responsibility. In “Be Kind,” which he co-wrote, he sings, “I don’t wanna see you cry,” because “people can be so cold.” Those are simple words, but they name something morally serious: our actions have consequences for other human beings, and decency requires attention to the pain we might cause.
That standard should apply here.
Macklemore’s activism has long moved beyond a general concern for Palestinian civilians, whose suffering is real and whose dignity matters. He has made Israel into a singular moral villain, mobilizing audiences with rhetoric and imagery that erase Israeli grief, Jewish trauma, Hamas’s brutality, and the actual complexity of a devastating war. To invite that message into a concert without warning, especially in the New York area, where so many Jews have deep family, communal, and personal ties to Israel, was reckless.
It is also worth saying plainly that criticism of an Israeli government is not the same thing as creating a public atmosphere in which Jewish concertgoers are asked to absorb mass political hostility toward the Jewish state as the price of enjoying an evening of music. Jewish safety and belonging are not conditional on silence about Israel. Nor is concern for Palestinian life strengthened by treating Jewish attachment to Israel as something inherently shameful or disposable.
Sheeran has built a career on songs that ask listeners to care for one another across heartbreak, loneliness, and loss. But care cannot remain merely lyrical. It has to show up in judgment, in accountability, and in the willingness to recognize when one’s platform has caused harm.
He should apologize to the fans who felt ambushed at MetLife Stadium. He should acknowledge that Macklemore’s set crossed a line from artistic expression into political agitation on a stage that Sheeran controlled. And he should make clear that future audiences will not be placed in the same position.
“I don’t wanna see you cry” is a beautiful sentiment. Now it is time for Ed Sheeran to live up to it.
Sep 4, 2026
Torah and the Ritual of Being Human (Nitzavim-Vayelech)
Torah and the Ritual of Being Human
(Nitzavim-Vayelech)
Rabbi Menachem Creditor
In Nitzavim-Vayelech, as Moses prepares to leave the people he has led, Torah itself becomes the center of communal life. Deuteronomy commands "Hakhel," the gathering of the entire people once every seven years: “Assemble the people, men, women, children, and the stranger in your midst, that they may hear, and that they may learn and revere Adonai your God” (Deut. 31:12).
It is striking to consider how different our experience of Torah can be. We are accustomed to its regular presence: on Shabbat, on Mondays and Thursdays, in classrooms and sanctuaries, in study partnerships, and now across distances through technology. For our ancestors, gathering was difficult. Travel required sacrifice. A shared encounter with Torah was rare enough to be commanded as a sacred national assembly.
And yet, the purpose of Torah has not changed. Torah is not meant merely to be mastered in private. It is meant to gather us, to bind us to one another, and to shape the way we live together. The mitzvah is not simply to learn Torah; it is to “assemble the people.” Torah is for people. Life is for living together.
As this year draws to its close and the work of Elul deepens, The mitzvah of Hakhel offers us a spiritual instruction: our self-accounting must lead us back toward one another. We are called to improve not only our ritual lives, but also the ritual of being human: how we listen, forgive, show up, and repair.
What a privilege it is to have Torah so available to us, and to have one another. May we never take that gift for granted. May our learning deepen our practice, our practice deepen our love, and our love help weave a stronger community in the year ahead.
Rabbi Menachem Creditor
In Nitzavim-Vayelech, as Moses prepares to leave the people he has led, Torah itself becomes the center of communal life. Deuteronomy commands "Hakhel," the gathering of the entire people once every seven years: “Assemble the people, men, women, children, and the stranger in your midst, that they may hear, and that they may learn and revere Adonai your God” (Deut. 31:12).
It is striking to consider how different our experience of Torah can be. We are accustomed to its regular presence: on Shabbat, on Mondays and Thursdays, in classrooms and sanctuaries, in study partnerships, and now across distances through technology. For our ancestors, gathering was difficult. Travel required sacrifice. A shared encounter with Torah was rare enough to be commanded as a sacred national assembly.
And yet, the purpose of Torah has not changed. Torah is not meant merely to be mastered in private. It is meant to gather us, to bind us to one another, and to shape the way we live together. The mitzvah is not simply to learn Torah; it is to “assemble the people.” Torah is for people. Life is for living together.
As this year draws to its close and the work of Elul deepens, The mitzvah of Hakhel offers us a spiritual instruction: our self-accounting must lead us back toward one another. We are called to improve not only our ritual lives, but also the ritual of being human: how we listen, forgive, show up, and repair.
What a privilege it is to have Torah so available to us, and to have one another. May we never take that gift for granted. May our learning deepen our practice, our practice deepen our love, and our love help weave a stronger community in the year ahead.
Aug 25, 2026
Aug 24, 2026
The Courage to Keep Becoming (Ki Tavo) - Creditor/Stone
The Courage to Keep Becoming (Ki Tavo)
Rabbi Menachem Creditor and Betsy Stone, Ph.D.
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| Butterfly Effect, Robert Roy Britt |
Parashat Ki Tavo arrives as Moses feels his mortality pressing against him. Standing near the end of his life, he tries to pour everything he has learned into the people he has led for forty years - a people who want to be led and resist being led, who demand independence and then plead to be cared for. In psychological terms, they resemble adolescents: “Help me. Leave me alone. Listen to me. Fix this.” Moses has spent a lifetime inside that impossible tension.
Perhaps Moses never wanted this life. He might have remained content as a prince or a shepherd. But human beings often grow most profoundly when life asks us to do what we would not have chosen. Moses’ expansion as a person happens through the demands he initially doubts he can meet. If we are fortunate, we spend our lives near the edge of our capacity - not falling from the cliff, but continually wondering: Can I do this? Can I become the person this moment requires?
By Parshat Ki Tavo, Moses is no longer the person who could have remained peacefully in Midian. Leadership has changed him. Relationship has changed him. Love has changed him. He cares too deeply to withdraw.
This is also how enduring relationships work. A strong and enduring marriage is not one marriage but perhaps 150 marriages: two people continually changing, adapting, and choosing one another again. The relationship changes because the people change; the people change because the relationship matters. What sustains love is not an unchanging history but a renewing commitment.
Pirkei Avot teaches that love dependent upon a particular thing disappears when that thing disappears, while love that is not dependent upon something endures (PA 5:16). Enduring love is not static. It lasts precisely because it can stretch without surrendering its deepest commitment. It makes room for growth, disappointment, repair, and return.
This distinction matters in a time when we speak constantly about “community” while experiencing an epidemic of loneliness and estrangement. Community can remain an abstraction. Connection requires presence. It develops incrementally - in conversation, disagreement, attention, and the willingness to remain beside another person. We cannot simply announce that we are connected. We test and strengthen connection through repeated encounters. We must also recover connection with ourselves - the capacity to sit quietly without immediately reaching for a screen to shield us from solitude.
Ki Tavo commands us to ritualize gratitude by retelling our story: “My ancestor was a wandering Aramean. (Deut. 26:5)” The declaration is not a complete history. It is a statement of commitment. We choose which memories will orient us, which values will guide us, and which story we will carry forward.
That may be the truest form of an ethical will. An ethical will should not say, “This is who you must become.” It should say, “This is how I tried to live. I failed at times, but these are the values that steered me.” Moses sometimes confuses those two messages, as parents and teachers often do. We offer an ethical structure and then struggle to relinquish control over what the next generation will build from it.
Even God, as portrayed in Torah and interpreted by Jewish tradition, must learn to make room for human freedom. Creation requires divine contraction - the willingness to cede power so another can become. Moses ultimately must do the same. He will not complete the journey, but he appoints Joshua and prepares the people to continue without him.
The deepest inheritance Moses leaves is therefore not perfection. It is the courage to keep becoming, the humility to release control, and the love that remains committed even when the future will not look exactly as we imagined. This is the sacred work of leadership, parenthood, friendship, marriage, and Elul: to honor what has been, remain present to what is, and make room for what - and who - may yet emerge.
Aug 17, 2026
Aug 14, 2026
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Aug 6, 2026
Aug 4, 2026
Choosing Blessing (Re'eh)
Choosing Blessing (Re'eh)
Rabbi Menachem Creditor
Re’eh begins with a stark declaration: “See, this day I set before you blessing and curse.” The Torah seems to suggest that blessing follows obedience and suffering follows failure. Yet we know the world does not work so neatly. Good people suffer. Those who devote themselves to blessing sometimes carry unbearable pain.
Perhaps the Torah is teaching something more demanding. Choosing blessing does not guarantee that we will be spared sorrow. It means placing goodness into the world because the goodness itself matters. The ancient rabbis taught that the reward for a mitzvah is another mitzvah. The blessing of an act of care is that it creates another possibility for care.
This teaching feels especially urgent when people around us are carrying invisible sadness. We do not always know the weight hidden behind another person’s smile or silence. Our Jewish community continues to bear layers of grief and trauma that will require years of love, attention, and mental health care.
In such a world, choosing blessing must become more than a beautiful idea. It is the demanding work of building networks of care, noticing one another, making the call, funding healing, and refusing to let anyone suffer alone.
Hope is also a choice. Our anthem, Hatikvah, declares that we have not lost our hope precisely because hope can be difficult to hold. Sometimes we must hold it for one another. Sometimes singing for another person, calling them, or simply remaining beside them becomes an act of sacred resistance.
If you are carrying sadness that makes you feel alone, please hear this clearly: You are loved. You are needed. Call 988. Call a friend. Call a rabbi. Let someone help carry what has become too heavy.
Re’eh begins with a stark declaration: “See, this day I set before you blessing and curse.” The Torah seems to suggest that blessing follows obedience and suffering follows failure. Yet we know the world does not work so neatly. Good people suffer. Those who devote themselves to blessing sometimes carry unbearable pain.
Perhaps the Torah is teaching something more demanding. Choosing blessing does not guarantee that we will be spared sorrow. It means placing goodness into the world because the goodness itself matters. The ancient rabbis taught that the reward for a mitzvah is another mitzvah. The blessing of an act of care is that it creates another possibility for care.
This teaching feels especially urgent when people around us are carrying invisible sadness. We do not always know the weight hidden behind another person’s smile or silence. Our Jewish community continues to bear layers of grief and trauma that will require years of love, attention, and mental health care.
In such a world, choosing blessing must become more than a beautiful idea. It is the demanding work of building networks of care, noticing one another, making the call, funding healing, and refusing to let anyone suffer alone.
Hope is also a choice. Our anthem, Hatikvah, declares that we have not lost our hope precisely because hope can be difficult to hold. Sometimes we must hold it for one another. Sometimes singing for another person, calling them, or simply remaining beside them becomes an act of sacred resistance.
If you are carrying sadness that makes you feel alone, please hear this clearly: You are loved. You are needed. Call 988. Call a friend. Call a rabbi. Let someone help carry what has become too heavy.
Re’eh commands us to see. See the person whose pain remains hidden. See the blessing we can offer. Choose blessing. Offer blessing. Be a blessing. Someone needs it. Perhaps that someone is you. You are not alone. You are loved.
You Are Not Alone | Reeh | #Broadcast1605 - In the US: Call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
In the US: Call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline,
available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Jul 31, 2026
Jul 30, 2026
Jul 29, 2026
Jul 27, 2026
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Jul 3, 2026
Jun 29, 2026
Defiant Dignity (Pinchas)
Defiant Dignity (Pinchas)
Rabbi Menachem Creditor
I dedicate this learning to my brother-in-law, Arsen Ostrovsky.
A few months ago, thanks to the generosity of beloved friends, I was able to travel recently to Sydney, Australia, in the aftermath of the horrific terrorist attack at Bondi Beach last December. My brother-in-law was shot in that attack. Thank God, he has physically recovered. My sister and nieces, who were also there, were not physically harmed, though they endured something no family should ever have to endure. Many people lost their lives.
Being in Sydney was both a blessing and an education. It revealed, painfully, the growing acceptability of antisemitism in too many places. And I want to be careful here. There is a difference between hateful rhetoric and violence. But they are connected. They exist on a continuum. The danger of violent rhetoric is that it does not stay limited to words.
Just yesterday, Arsen testified before Australia’s Royal Commission of Inquiry into antisemitism. He recounted not only the attack itself, but the thousands of threats and messages that followed, people turning his suffering into a conspiracy theory, claiming it was staged, that the blood on his face was makeup, that AI had somehow manufactured the evidence. All of it was a rejection of the right of a Jew to live in dignity.
He stood with eloquence and bravery. His voice quivered only when he spoke about our family, his children, his wife, my sister. It was a model of Jewish courage, Jewish pride, and moral steadiness. To stand in the face of antisemitism and call it out publicly, with dignity and clarity, is one of the responsibilities of this moment. He did so in a way that nobly modeled the mandate.
That brings us to Parashat Pinchas, one of the most difficult portions in the Torah.
The story begins at the end of last week’s portion. Israel is under assault, spiritually and communally. A plague breaks out. Pinchas, the son of Elazar, the son of Aaron the priest, sees a public desecration at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting. He takes a spear and kills two people, and the plague stops.
This week’s portion opens with what sounds like divine praise. God says that Pinchas turned back divine wrath by displaying his passion, his “kina,” a word that means zeal, jealousy, fervor. And then God says, “Therefore, I grant him My covenant of shalom, My covenant of peace.”
That should trouble us. It must trouble us.
Yes, Pinchas acts in response to a threat against the community. Yes, Jewish leaders today must stand up against threats to Jewish dignity, including Antisemitism - and the Antizionism that so often serves as its fig leaf. We must speak, organize, testify, confront, and refuse to shrink.
But we must not do what Pinchas did. His act was violent. It was a spear thrust into human bodies. And even if the Torah presents the biblical context as a moment of existential threat, our ethical instinct must resist any easy sanctification of violence. We fight for Jewish safety, but we fight like mentches. We fight within the norms of a just society. We fight with strength, with strategy, with clarity, and with dignity.
And perhaps the Torah knows this too.
The word shalom in this verse is written in the Torah scroll with a broken vav. The letter itself is fractured. Anywhere else, a broken letter would make the scroll invalid. Here, the brokenness is required. The Torah is kosher only if this shalom is visibly wounded.
What kind of peace follows violence? A broken peace. A peace that may stop a plague, but cannot be whole. A peace that may interrupt destruction, but cannot be the fullness our people deserves.
Watching Arsen testify, and then watching him speak afterward with defiant dignity, I saw a different model. Fierce, but not cruel. Strong, but not violent. Unyielding, but deeply human. He channeled the best lesson we might draw from Pinchas without importing the worst of Pinchas.
That is our calling now.
We bless each other to be strong and fierce in defense of Jewish dignity, just as we are strong and fierce in defense of human dignity. We dare not shrink. Our children are watching. And if we want them to inherit a whole peace, not a broken one, we must teach them how to fight like mentches by modeling that commitment ourselves, fiercely and mindfully.
Jun 26, 2026
American Torah at 250: Call for Contributions!
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American Torah at 250
Goals
1. Mark America’s 250th anniversary through a Jewish lens.
The volume should explore how Jewish texts, history, and values can illuminate “the American experiment” and how America has impacted Judaism and the Jewish community.
2. Provide usable sermons for the Jewish year 5787.
Contributions should connect and explore democratic themes to particular Torah portions and perhaps holidays.
3. Strengthen democratic culture without promoting partisanship.
The collection can address difficult public questions while remaining nonpartisan. Its focus should be democratic principles, civic responsibilities, moral formation, the importance of virtue, and the health of the republic.
4. Encourage both gratitude and moral accountability.
The book should make room for appreciation of American freedom and Jewish flourishing, while also confronting the gaps between America’s founding ideals and its historical and present realities.
Call for Contributions
In celebration of the 250th anniversary of the United States, Rabbi Charlie Savenor and Rabbi Menachem Creditor will be publishing a collection of original sermons for the weekly Torah portions of the Jewish year 5787. At this historic moment, we invite rabbis, cantors, scholars, educators, and Jewish communal leaders to help communities encounter the American story through Torah, and Torah through the responsibilities of American citizenship. Together, these sermons will offer a year of Jewish learning and civic reflection for America at 250.
The Torah-reading cycle gives Jewish communities a shared language through which to confront enduring questions of freedom, , justice, leadership, power, responsibility, disagreement, memory, and belonging. During America’s 250th anniversary year, these weekly readings offer a unique opportunity to consider the achievements, tensions, and unfinished work of American democracy.
For over two and a half centuries, life in America has created extraordinary opportunities for Jewish freedom, religious expression, civic participation, and communal flourishing. At the same time, the nation has repeatedly struggled to live up to its own aspirations ideals expressed in its founding documents. This anniversary invites both gratitude and honest reflection, celebration and renewed commitment.
We are seeking sermons that connect a specific weekly Torah portion with themes related to American democracy and civic life. Contributions might explore subjects including liberty and responsibility, covenant and Constitution, equality and human dignity, citizenship, immigration, religious freedom, political leadership, character, protest, pluralism, civil disagreement, minority rights, public trust, truth, national memory, civic friendship, or the pursuit of a more perfect union.
Authors might consider questions such as:
· What does this Torah portion teach about the responsibilities of citizenship and leadership?
· How can Jewish tradition illuminate the promises and contradictions of "the American experiment" in self-government?
· What obligations accompany freedom?
· How should communities respond to injustice, exclusion, polarization, or the abuse of power?
· What can the Jewish traditions of covenant, argument, memory, repentance, and communal responsibility contribute to democratic life?
How should we approach a hyphenated American Jewish identity today?
· How does this weekly Torah reading help us imagine America's next chapters?
Submissions should be written as sermons intended for delivery to a congregation and should be rooted substantively in the assigned Torah portion. They may express gratitude, critique, concern, aspiration, or hope, but they should promote civic reflection rather than partisan advocacy.
The collection will include one or two sermons for each weekly Torah portion, contributors are encouraged to select up to two parshiot they would be willing to address. The sign up for parshiot are available is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Zfpwnl89MUEPqPb83ByWGDHU5PW3u1vhgM0wqUZIBLY/edit?usp=sharing.
Submissions should be sent to torahwithin@gmail.com by September 1. Sermons should not exceed 1,200 words and must be submitted in Word format. Please include the author’s name, title, institutional affiliation, short biography, and the Torah portion for which the sermon is submitted.
NOTE: The editors may not be able to include every contribution and that accepted pieces may be edited for length, clarity, style, and consistency. Final assignments may be coordinated by the editors to ensure broad coverage of the Torah-reading cycle and a diverse range of civic themes.
#AmericanTorahAt250 #America250 #Torah #JewishLearning #JewishCommunity #Democracy #CivicLife #FaithAndDemocracy #AmericanJewish #MorePerfectUnion
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