Tag: hope
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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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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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Probabilities Don’t Hug You Back: A Neilah Sermon for a World Without Guarantees
This Neilah sermon begins with a story from the town of Chelm, where a drought has caused a crisis of faith, and the people demand proof that God is listening. Into this debate steps Jossele, who argues that while he can’t be certain about God, he knows that a life of kindness, forgiveness, and charity…
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The Pain of Being Unseen: A Rosh Hashanah Message of Hope and Recognition
On Rosh Hashanah, we stand before the Divine with a profound and deeply human hope: to be truly seen. This sermon explores the quiet, sinking feeling of being overlooked that we have all experienced and connects it to the central prayers of the High Holy Days. It asks: What is the greatest blessing we can…
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Marching With the Sound of Hope
In this sermon, Rabbi Adrian Schell continues the courageous conversation taking place in his community, addressing grief, moral disorientation, and hope in turbulent times. Drawing on Numbers Chapter 10, he explores the symbolic power of the silver trumpets: tools that call to community, to action, and to memory. Just as the Israelites finally moved when…
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2018 is coming to its end …
Chaverim Yakarim —dear friends 2018 is coming to its end, and while we traditionally use the High Holy Days to look back, I’d like to invite you to do so, one more time. 2018 came with hopes, hopes for freedom, success and growth—some became true, but we also have to carry forward some of them to…
