Hear from Rabbi Hanan Schlesinger and Khaled Abu Awwad, leaders of Roots/Shorashim/Judur, an Israeli-Palestinian grassroots initiative for understanding, nonviolence, and transformation. They represent a unique network of local Palestinians and Israelis who have come to see each other as partners in the work to make changes to end the conflict. They share with Rabbi Sharon Brous and Melissa Balaban their personal stories of struggle and transformation as well as their vision of mutual national r...
Feb 24, 2025•1 hr 2 min
In a time of loneliness and isolation, social rupture and alienation, what will it take to mend our broken hearts and rebuild our society? Join Rabbi Brous in a series of text studies that explore the Jewish sources that form the core ideas behind her new book, The Amen Effect.
Feb 24, 2025•1 hr 2 min
We are lost and disoriented. How can the core values of this week's Torah portion supply us with a compass to navigate the landscape of moral injury?
Feb 23, 2025•18 min
Yitro reminds us, in the twisted reality of our time: do not quiet your intuition. Defy the new norms. Live from your deepest moral convictions, not your most callous political calculations. And do not eat the tainted grain— no matter how hungry you are. Keep searching for an alternative food source. There is always another food source.
Feb 17, 2025•19 min
Four postures our tradition warns against, in the face of grave threat: Do not snail. Do not capitulate. Do not meet become the mirror image of your enemy. Do not render yourselves preemptively powerlessness. Instead: do what you know.
Feb 09, 2025•17 min
We are all struggling in this moment of deep darkness - either riding the constant emotional rollercoaster or already feeling numb. The thing is that both of these will destroy us. Instead, we need to stay connected to our humanity and each other to get us through. That is the only way we will find ourselves back in the light.
Feb 02, 2025•20 min
How do American Jews navigate complex conversations about Israel and Palestine across generations? And what does it take to truly listen to each other? Rabbi Sharon Brous sits down with IKAR’s CEO Melissa Balaban and her daughter Emma Wergeles to reflect on their recent trip to Israel and the West Bank with Encounter. From different generational perspectives, they share what challenged them, what moved them, and why direct engagement with both Palestinian and Israeli perspectives is essential fo...
Jan 29, 2025•56 min
This is the moment to remember who we are, to ground ourselves in the story that stands in determined opposition to the story of tyranny. To tell of a God who cares about the vulnerable. To become again a people whose faith compels us to protect the frightened.
Jan 26, 2025•15 min
After 15 months of catastrophic loss, unspeakable heartache, and the utter undoing of not one but two peoples—in body and spirit, we stand—at this moment—at an inflection point. May this be the beginning of the end of the suffering. May it be the beginning of the path toward a just peace. Read the sermon here.
Jan 19, 2025•18 min
Even as the fires burn, let us hold on another, give voice to what we have lost, and turn toward what remains.
Jan 12, 2025•21 min
How did Joseph, a man hardened by one life experience after the next, soften his heart to forgive his brothers? A remarkable midrash imagines a conversation between Joseph and Benjamin that changes everything. Ten names and all the worlds of meaning, of missing, of memory they contain.
Jan 05, 2025•19 min
What is Joseph's legacy? And what can we learn from the character with the most costume changes in all of the Torah?
Dec 29, 2024•16 min
Jacob tried to flee from his estranged brother. Did he fear more the battle, or the potential reconciliation? What happens when victimhood is built into our self-definition? What do we lose when we stay at the table, and what might we gain? What will it take for us to understand that there is no future until we see one another? Vayishlah 5785
Dec 15, 2024•19 min
Dec 08, 2024•32 min
Dec 08, 2024•1 hr 2 min
There is a teaching in Pirkei Avot that says that the mouth of the well was made during the first Shabbat of creation. We have long accepted it to be Miriam's well, but what if it's the well from this week's parsha - the one Jacob encounters after his dream, and where he meets Rachel for the first time? If it's that well, then maybe we, like Jacob, have to find the well, roll off the stone, and discover what exists underneath.
Dec 08, 2024•19 min
Who is Isaac? The man perpetually trapped by his father’s story, still bound to the altar, forever defined by the core trauma of his life. What will it take to break free? For the once bound to become unbound? Source sheet: https://ikar.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Isaac_-Bound-and-Unbound-1.pdf
Dec 01, 2024•18 min
After a life of heartache, two estranged brothers affirmed each other’s humanity, and rediscovered their own. We, too, can make that choice. Let us push back on the encroaching darkness as a force for good—a light force—that counters the cruelty, racism, and violence poisoning our culture with compassion, tender presence, and forgiveness. This is what solidarity looks like.
Nov 24, 2024•22 min
Loving your neighbor, who is like you, whose identity you share, is not enough. You must stretch the boundaries of love to wrap into its embrace the stranger, the people in our society who are furthest away from power. To counter the frenzy of rhetoric and the aspirations of policy that demonize these human beings, we need to love them fiercely. We need to love them fully.
Nov 17, 2024•17 min
Now we must learn the lesson our ancestor Avram learned: one day our dreams will be realized. Just not today. And not tomorrow. And maybe not for many years. But just as hope doesn’t die, dreams don’t die. The dream we share for America didn’t die because our dream— the dream of a just and merciful multiracial democracy in which all people live in dignity— that dream is the right dream. It is the only future… it’s just now clear that it will take much longer to achieve than any of us had hoped....
Nov 10, 2024•21 min
There’s an eerie resonance between the Noah narrative and this week. What does Noah's Flood teach us about navigating chaos and coming once more to land?
Nov 03, 2024•14 min
After the death of a beloved child in our community to suicide, we reaffirm our commitment to combatting shame with tenderhearted love, to meeting one another in the dark, to never giving up on each other. May Benjamin Ellis’s memory be a blessing.
Oct 27, 2024•24 min
Sermon from Shemini atzeret
Oct 27, 2024•13 min
Sukkot reflects our people's ancient narrative, balancing the transience of a wandering nation and the fragility of life with our yearning for home and the Eternal Divine. How does our tradition compel us to relate to those who yearn for home, but who are left to wander?
Oct 20, 2024•15 min
The only way forward is one broken heart next to another, crying together, awakening to the reality that grief is our common bond.
Oct 13, 2024•27 min
There is a dominant story in America today—a story of isolation, alienation, and narrow-minded extremism, fueled by a deeply unsettling convergence of right- and left-wing antisemitism. This story—propagated by a would-be authoritarian—plays on our worst instincts: the smallness, the fear, the ever-present sense of scarcity. And it threatens to do untold damage. We must write something new.
Oct 13, 2024•34 min
Text study and conversation between Alex Edelman and Rabbi Sharon Brous on the Torah of Joy, and the Power, Promise, and Necessity of Laughter in Dark Times.
Oct 06, 2024•49 min
Hope doesn’t die, and despair is a privilege we cannot afford.
Oct 06, 2024•37 min
We think of t'shuvah as a process that begins quietly, internally. We take stock and then we act. But what if we need an external catalyst first? What if we need to return to a physical place in order to encounter ourselves again - a different version of ourselves, different pieces. What can returning to a place surface for us? And what does our tradition show us can come from that journey?
Oct 02, 2024•24 min
One year after her sister's death, Michal rethinks the Talmudic story of "the oven of achnei" and Moses's final speech to the people to reflect upon the importance of small and private acts.
Sep 29, 2024•15 min
