A New Midrash for Sh'mini
Leviticus 10:1-3 Now Aaron’s sons Nadav and Abihu each took his fire pan, put fire in it, and laid incense on it; and they offered before...
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Rabbi Rachel Bearman
"True service to God is service to one
another." - Lily Montagu
(To learn more about Lily Montagu, please click here.)
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Rosh Hashanah 5784 / 2023
CLICK HERE TO WATCH THIS SERMON (Go to 1:30 in the video if you'd like to skip directly to the sermon.) While you might not recognize the...
Rosh Hashanah 2022/5783
The morning that the Dobbs decision was expected to be released, I was sitting in my office, refreshing the Supreme Court’s website over...
June 24th: We Are the Sotah
Rabbi Bearman's Note: This reflection is based on the Sotah ritual- first described in the Book of Numbers- where a woman would be forced...
A Sermon For May 27th 2022
CLICK HERE TO WATCH THIS SERMON (Go to 47:50) Shabbat Shalom, friends. I want to begin by saying that I spent some time this week...
A Sermon for Noach
This week’s Torah portion is Parashat Noach, and it includes two very famous stories (and a lot of genealogies). The first of the...
Moses & the Storm
According to tradition, Rosh Chodesh Elul (the first day of the month before the High Holy Days) was the day that Moses went back up...
A Sermon for Naso
This week’s Torah portion, Naso, is the second portion in the book of Numbers. In the middle of the parashah, nestled between seemingly...
A Story of Motherhood
The sound woke me from a deep sleep. It must have triggered the instinct that caring for my own son had planted deeply in my brain...
Be Holy, Earthlings
In this week’s double Torah portion - Acharei Mot, Kedoshim- we read a very famous verse, “Speak to the whole Israelite community and say...
A New Midrash for Ki tisa
THE ISRAELITES: The whispers have been flying for days. They buzz and bite like the flies that tormented the Egyptians. Moses has been...
Miriam: More Water Than Woman
I’ve been waiting to die for weeks. Each day, as we travel through the desert, I put one foot in front of the other, toes slipping in...
In the beginning...
In the beginning, for unknowable amounts of time, Divinity existed in a world that was unformed and mysterious. They were not lonely....
A Sermon for the last Shabbat of 2020
Earlier this week, I read a piece in the New York Times called, “How We Survive the Winter.” The article was published the day before the...
A Midrash For Vayishlach
The prayer of the unnamed, unloved, and unwritten. We are the wives of Jacob. We are the unnamed, the unloved, and the unwritten. We are...
A New Midrash for Bereshit
I was the snake. The fruit was not temptation; it was opportunity. The sin would have been to stay in ignorance, to remain in the garden...
A Sermon for Yom Kippur 2020
For months and months, I’ve been excitedly considering what I should talk about in my first High Holy Day sermon at my new congregation....
Following Channah's Example: A Prayer for Rosh Hashanah
The Haftarah portion for Rosh Hashanah comes from the first two chapters of 1 Samuel, and it tells the story of two, very unhappy women....
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