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A spiritual Bar Mitzvah
Thirteen years ago today, on 10 April, I stood with my colleagues to begin a journey that has defined my life in ways I could never have fully imagined. This milestone feels particularly poignant because, in our tradition, the number thirteen represents a transition into a new stage of responsibility and maturity.
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Being Alive is Reason Enough
Life trains us to ask hard questions. We are skilled at complicating what is good, at asking what price was paid and who is left behind. We spill drops of wine at the Seder precisely because we carry the suffering of others inside our own joy.Yet the Song of the Sea suggests a different spiritual…
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Love, Justice, and the Soul of Israel
Rabbi Adrian Schell examines the moral test of the soul of Israel in this Pesach [Passover] sermon. Drawing on Deuteronomy and Song of Songs, he addresses the Kotel [Western Wall] bill and the Death Penalty Bill, arguing that liberation requires protecting the dignity of the stranger and the Soul of the Jewish State. True love…
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The Wilderness Was Always The Point
The expectation of a stable, secure world as a precondition for real life, for serious community, or for spiritual depth, is, in the Torah’s own terms, a category error. Safety as a precondition is not available. What is available is vulnerability, and a community that knows what to do with it. The question facing us…
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They Burned Our Ambulances, Not Our Resolve
On Monday morning, we woke to images that turn the stomach. Four ambulances, vehicles whose absolute sole purpose is to save lives, were reduced to charred, twisted metal in Golders Green. The shattered glass and the blackened frames speak of a profound, targeted hatred. To attack a Jewish volunteer emergency service is not simply an…
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Finding Holiness in a Fractured World
Vayikra [and He called] refuses the idea that faith should be simple, tidy, or continuous. It understands that life is fractured, and that a human being often comes to the holy place carrying contradiction. Sometimes we arrive with devotion. Sometimes we arrive with numbness. Sometimes we arrive because something inside us has gone wrong, and…
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Touching the Edge of Life
The Torah recognises that death and pain change the texture of the air around us. In this sermon for Shabbat Parah, Rabbi Adrian explores the ancient ritual of the Red Heifer (Parah Adumah) from Numbers 19. While we often focus on the bereaved, the Torah highlights a striking paradox: those who help others become “pure”…
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Beyond the Megillah
Purim usually brings laughter, but this year the news from the Middle East feels particularly heavy. As we watch regimes shift and sirens sound, how do we find the genuine courage to celebrate? I have been reflecting on the resilience of our friends in Israel and the humbling grace of the Baha’i community. Let us…
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The Geometry of Wholeness
In a world that prizes the “finished” individual, the Torah offers a provocative alternative: the half-shekel. By requiring a contribution that is intentionally incomplete, the mitzvah suggests that we cannot arrive before the Divine entirely on our own. Rabbi Adrian explores how our modern obsession with self-reliance can lead to isolation, and why the “grammar…
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Memory as a Sacred Obligation
The silence left behind by the stopped hostage clock is not the joyous quiet of a struggle won, but the heavy stillness of a cycle closed. In Parashat Beshallach, we read that Moses took the bones of Joseph with him out of Egypt. Even in a life or death escape, the leader of our people…
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