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PODCAST

From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life

Temple Emanuel in Newton

Bringing weekly Jewish insights into your life. Join Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz, Rabbi Michelle Robinson and Rav-Hazzan Aliza Berger of Temple Emanuel in Newton, MA as they share modern ancient wisdom.

religion & spirituality judaism

All Episodes

00:27:16

Shabbat Sermon: My Journey in Israel with Cantor...

From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life ·

2025/05/24

Following the March of the Living trip, Cantor Rosemberg remained in Israel to volunteer and perform with 25 Latin American cantors. Listen to learn about Cantor Rosemberg's incredibly meaningful and moving experience!

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00:42:36

Talmud Class: On Standards - Having Them, Enforcing...

From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life ·

2025/05/24

Standards. Is there an elegant theory for when to enforce them and when to choose not to enforce them? Parents face this question all the time. We have standards in our home! But our children do their own thing that flies in the face of our standards. Do we enforce the standard, or let it go? Synagogues face this question all the time. To celebrate a Bar/Bat Mitzvah in our community, a family is expected to fulfill certain requirements, like attending Shabbat services a certain number of times. What

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00:14:19

Shabbat Sermon: We Are Cosmos 482 with Rabbi Wes...

From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life ·

2025/05/17

Fifty-three years ago, on March 31, 1972, the Soviet Union launched a spacecraft that was supposed to go to Venus. But it never made it to Venus. Some malfunction in the rocket prevented it from leaving the earth’s orbit. The Soviets named this spacecraft Cosmos 482—which became code in Soviet lexicon for epic failure. For 53 years, the spacecraft that could never make it to Venus circled the earth. Year after year never getting to where it was meant to go. Year after year stuck in a perpetual

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00:37:00

Talmud Class: Loving Critics

From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life ·

2025/05/17

Loving critics. The phrase feels like an oxymoron. In fact it is a willed double entendre. Perhaps it means that critics are loving. Their words of critique flow from a place of love. In fact, they feel that suppressing their critique, going along to get along, would undermine that which they love. Perhaps loving critics means that people who are not critics should nonetheless love and appreciate people who are critics. Perhaps they have something to say that we and others need to hear. Should we

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01:20:57

What Does It Mean To Be Pro-Israel in 2025?...

From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life ·

2025/05/13

Adina Vogel Ayalon – an Israeli citizen who has lived and raised a family in Israel and worked for decades toward building peaceful relations between Israelis and Palestinians – and Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz are uniquely positioned to unpack some of the difficult questions facing our communities today, including:How can American Jews most effectively advocate to bring about the return of the hostages, sideline Hamas and promote a peaceful and safe future for Israeli and Palestinian families alike?What

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00:16:12

Shabbat Sermon: L’Chayim with Rabbi Michelle Robinson

From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life ·

2025/05/10

May 10, 2025

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00:37:08

Talmud Class: Local Imperfect Peace Part 2: Mipnei...

From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life ·

2025/05/10

Last week we encountered one kind of “imperfect peace,” to use the term coined by our teacher, Sara Labaton of Hartman: shalom bayit, domestic harmony, made possible by a lack of transparency in a marriage. We read the ruling of Ovadia Yosef that a wife not disclose the fact of her abortion before she had met her husband so that their marriage could continue.This week we encounter another complicated rabbinic category of imperfect peace: mipnei darchei shalom, the things we do for the sake of peace

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00:15:32

Shabbat Sermon: When It Just Is with Rabbi Wes...

From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life ·

2025/05/03

A woman in Israel approached her rabbi with the following dilemma. When she was a younger woman, she was not religious. She had relations with a man and got pregnant. She had an abortion. She then became religious. She did teshuvah, repentance. She committed herself to learning Torah, doing mitzvot and joining an observant community. She moved to a new town, where she was not known, met a young yeshiva student who did not know about her past. She did not tell him. They got married. She got pregnant

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00:36:51

Talmud Class: Is a Small Peace, a Local Peace, an...

From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life ·

2025/05/03

Sara Labaton, the Director of Teaching and Learning at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, recently taught a group of local rabbis. She observed that the prophetic ideals of peace (lion lies down the with lamb, nations will beat swords into ploughshares, neither will they know war anymore) are so lofty as to be unattainable. Would we be better off looking towards rabbinic ideals of peace?The good news for rabbinic ideals of peace: not lofty. Not utopian.The bad news: rabbinic ideals of

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00:41:35

Talmud Class: Between the Holocaust and Israel

From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life ·

2025/04/26

God is always confusing. We never know what to think. But that is especially true now in this fraught theological season between commemorating the Shoah (April 24), honoring soldiers who fell in Israel’s wars and victims of terrorism on Yom Hazikaron (April 30), and celebrating the birth of the State of Israel on om Ha’atzmaut (May 1). Tomorrow we are going to study a modern Jewish philosopher that we have never before studied, Rabbi Irving Greenberg, who came up with a new scheme: the Three Eras of

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00:41:35

Shabbat Sermon - April 26, 2025

From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life ·

2025/04/26

Led by Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz

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00:19:50

Pesach Sermon: Our Unfinished Love Story—A Yizkor...

From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life ·

2025/04/20

What happens when we lose our loved ones before we lose them? This happens to so many of our families. Our loved one experiences a slow decline, cognitively, or physically, that takes place over years that feels like forever. The decline crowds out earlier chapters.Our mother has not been herself for so long I can’t even remember what she used to be like.It’s been so long since my father was who he really was, I can’t remember him before his dementia set in.What do we do with this pain when we lose

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00:41:35

Shabbat Sermon: Make Your Offering and Then Let It Go...

From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life ·

2025/04/19

In 1987 Oprah Winfrey read a book that changed her life. What happened to her as a result of reading that book, the unanticipated lesson she learned, remains fresh and urgent for her 38 years later.The book, by author Toni Morrison, was a novel called Beloved in which Morrison attempts to show what it was like to be a slave. What did slavery do to the enslaved person’s inner life, to their psyche, to their soul? How did slavery shape not only the enslaved person, but also their descendants—even when

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00:34:17

Talmud Class: Why Does Our Tradition Canonize, Twice,...

From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life ·

2025/04/19

Powerful leaders who lie are as old as the Bible. Our Haftarah tomorrow, King David’s song of gratitude to God (2 Samuel 22:1-51), contains a big fat lie—a lie so obvious, so brazen, that one wonders how he had the temerity to utter it. King David says of himself:The Lord rewarded me according to my merit,He requited the cleanness of my hands.For I have kept the ways of the LordAnd have not been guilty before my God;I am mindful of all His rulesAnd have not departed from His laws.I have been

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00:19:42

Pesach Day 2 Sermon: Not Four Questions: Just One...

From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life ·

2025/04/14

How is this Passover different from all other Passovers? How is the seder we are doing tonight different from all the other seders we have ever done? Let me share a recent conversation I had with a good friend.We have a beloved member of our shul whose mother was born in Londorf, Germany. She was taken with all the other Jews of Londorf to Auschwitz. She was the only survivor from her town. Every other Jew of Londorf perished in Auschwitz. But his mother would go on to survive and thrive, to live a

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00:18:34

Shabbat Sermon: Getting Generations Right with Rabbi...

From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life ·

2025/04/12

In 1992 Rabbi Joseph Telushkin published a book entitled Jewish Humor: What the Best Jewish Jokes Say About Jews. While he dedicated the book to his three daughters, the first chapter is about how hard it is for generations in a Jewish family to understand one another; how easy it is for frictions and misunderstandings to grow. Chapter one is entitled “Oedipus, Shmedipus, as Long as He Loves His Mother.” This is the first joke in his book.Three elderly Jewish women are seated on a bench in Miami

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00:28:04

Talmud Class: Can One Person Change the World?

From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life ·

2025/04/12

Can one person change the world?That is the question at the end of the tractate Sanhedrin. The word "Sanhedrin" means the supreme judicial, civic, legal, religious authority in ancient Israel. The Talmudic tractate Sanhedrin is about justice-the human beings, institutions, procedures and protocols, evidentiary rules, safeguards, that enable human beings to create and sustain a just society.Because justice in this world is so elusive, Sanhedrin's final chapter deals with other-worldly

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00:25:08

Shabbat Sermon: Four Questions to Ask at This Year's...

From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life ·

2025/04/05

Rabbi Mishael Zion comes from a Haggadah-filled home: he is co-author of A Night to Remember: The Haggadah of Contemporary Voices (2007) and The Israeli Haggadah (2024), together with his father Noam Zion, who is the author of A Different Night: The Family Participation Haggadah (Hartman, 1997). Mishael was ordained by Yeshivat Chovevei Torah in New York, has served as co-Director and rabbi of the Bronfman Fellowships, and founded the Mandel Program for Leadership in Jewish Culture for Israeli Arts,

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00:11:52

Shabbat Sermon: Listen, Listen, Listen with Rav...

From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life ·

2025/03/29

This week, I was speaking with a member who has been struggling with an intense family situation and was heading into a tense and painful meeting. She was riding in a Lyft. The driver was playing Christian radio quietly in the front. A few minutes before they arrived at their destination, she heard something on the radio that piqued her interest. "Can you turn that up?" she asked. The hosts of the Christian radio show were discussing a verse from the book of Joshua where God says to

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00:39:46

Talmud Class: Do Today's Troubling Headlines Belong...

From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life ·

2025/03/29

Shall we invite the troubling headlines—from Israel, Gaza, America, our world—to our seders? Are our seders supposed to be a joyful way to avoid the world (family, friends, songs, children’s skits, plays, games, great food, lots of wine, tasty desserts), or an invitation to engage the world and think out loud together about how we can make it better?Are there any great options? Three options present themselves:Festival of worry. If everyone around the seder table agrees, and we talk about it, what

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