by Rabbi Misha

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem:

by Rabbi Misha

As the world jumps up and down, throwing my heart around, grabbing at my attention with all its sparkling might...

by Rabbi Misha

“Would you kill a baby chicken for a billion dollars?” This was the question Manu posed to me as part of our morning prayers today. My heavy-handed response that followed was a reflection of the troubling effect this week’s events had on my soul. “Do you know what a sin is,” I recall myself asking. “No,” said my seven-year-old.

by Rabbi Misha

In the upside down ways of the world, people want to win. “Total victory,” says one leader, "I didn’t lose, I won big,” says another.

by Rabbi Misha

Please forgive me in advance for stepping out this week of my rabbinic frame of mind and inhabiting my position as a concerned Israeli living in the US. I won’t be invoking the tradition today, which means I won’t be talking about morality, humanity, responsibility and love.

by Rabbi Misha

In honor of the arrival of summer, two Iberian poems to drive us out of the never-fading anxiousness about the state of the world and into the plain reality of this beautiful season:

by Rabbi Misha

As somehow always happens when you study the Book of Job, we ended up chewing on Job’s final words. We were already in hour three or four of our wonderful Tikkun Leil Shavuot this week, which focused on Job, when the words were spoken: 

by Rabbi Misha

Amazingly in synch with the times, this Shabbat’s parashah deals with reward and punishment.

by Rabbi Misha

An interview with Authentic Movement teacher, Eileen Shulman

by Rabbi Misha

There come times when the only thing to do is to break the rules; to go against the foundational principles; to do the exact opposite of what you always believed to be right. Is this one of those times?

by Rabbi Misha

War engenders despair. It gets in your head and speaks about your meaninglessness and powerlessness. It kills people as a means of killing hope. Which never works. Like life, hope continues.

by Rabbi Misha

When the Holy Blessed One came to create Adam the first human, the ministering angels divided into various factions.

by Rabbi Misha

In the second century in Palestine, after the failed Bar Kochva rebellion, the Roman Emperor Adrianus imposed harsh laws on the Jews that included forbidding the practice of the religion.

by Rabbi Misha

Wishing you a happy Passover, a Zissen Pesach and Shabbat shalom.

by Rabbi Misha

The story of this war begins on October 7th, 2023. No, it begins several years earlier when Gaza was closed off. No, it begins in June 2007 when Hamas beat Fatah and took over the Strip.

by Rabbi Misha

In 1934, in the dead of winter, the chief rabbi of Palestine, Harav Kook received an urgent telegram. Three Jews escaping persecution were caught making their way through the snow from Russia across the Polish border. Their white clothes used for camouflage didn’t help.

by Rabbi Misha

Last night we finally got to see John get made up and assisted into his costume. It’s a process that takes several hours.

by Rabbi Misha

Every spring, exactly one week before Passover a unique ritual takes place in the South of India. The local Jews leave their towns, cities and villages, and make pilgrimage to a small, holy mountain tucked away to the east of the backwaters.

by Rabbi Misha

Before I begin, I'd like to invite you all to a very special gathering we're holding this evening, which can connect us to both the reality of the current situation in Israel/Palestine, and the hopeful ways people are working to overcome it.

by Rabbi Misha

It has been fifteen years since I began obsessing over Pharaoh. It began in a tiny village in the south of India, a lush, tropical heaven by a river, where I had come to watch a play. It was a little longer than most plays I had seen with a run time of just over two weeks.