Rabbi Rachel Bearman

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....

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....

A couple years ago, while I was visiting my family in Memphis, I spent an afternoon doing what everyone does on vacation… digitizing old...

I was taught, and I believe, that the Torah is not the history of the world but is instead the Jewish people’s way of telling our own...

Narratives that coalesce around a single person who is the only one who can perform a critical task are ever present and ever popular. I...

Figuring out what I wanted to speak about tonight was a very lengthy and difficult process. I started and abandoned several sermons until...

When the first and second Temples still stood in Jerusalem, Yom Kippur looked significantly different than it does today. The ancient...

Over the summer, I received a message from Rabbi Paul Kipnes, who serves a congregation in California. In addition to his pulpit work,...

In tractate Sanhedrin 17b of the Babylonian Talmud, we read: A Torah scholar is not allowed to live in a city that does not have these 10...

One of the most powerful and important motifs that we find in the High Holy Day prayer book is the idea of the Book of Life. On Rosh...