Here’s a fun text study exercise if you get a chance over Shabbat or before - compare the beginning of our parasha, Shlach (follow this...

With the start of Shabbat will come the start of Ellul - our month of preparation for the Chagim to come. One of my friends, a fellow...

Picture the scene which is set in this week’s parasha. You are in hills east of the Jordan river, surrounded by the tents and banners of...

Last night, our minyan was fortunate to meet Jude Rose and watch a film about their journey from being a rebbetzin to coming out as...

Most of this week’s Torah drashot will be about Noah - because it’s parashat Noah - and because Noah’s Ark is a majestic, iconic story...

We are at an awesome time of year, the shabbat before Rosh Hashana, where all of a sudden, Ellul - our month of preparation - has slipped...

Yosef, Moshe and Chanukah In the thick of the Torah’s longest story, the Yosef story, there are moments of deja vu where we’d be forgiven...

The ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus' paradox, is a thought experiment that raises the question of whether an object (like a ship)...

Towards the end of this week’s parasha, almost forgotten between God’s epic “lech lecha” call to Avram, and the chilling “brit bein...

If I say the word “duckhouse” the adult Brits in the room know instantly what I’m talking about! We’ve had some quite entertaining...

Ki Tisa: The God of second chances I once had a colleague who used to say “I believe in the God of second chances”. If ever there was a...

This parasha was one of the first Jewish texts to come into my life - in the form of my bat mitzvah sedra. In my 1998 (indeed!) dvar...

I was 17 when my best friend told me he was gay. At the time it was a shock - I’d never (at least as far as I knew at the time) known a...

The Amida, our most iconic tefillah, known as simply “the prayer” opens with the following words: “Blessed are You, Hashem, Our God and...

We have arrived at the book of Devarim, literally “words”. Moshe, the man who we noted in parashat Chukat said לֹא אִישׁ דְּבָרִים...

It’s not always easy to find the right words. Sometimes it’s easier not to pick up the phone, or avoid a conversation. If you can relate...

I’m sure we’ve all come across clickbait headlines like “The 2 most shocking rules the royal family has to keep”. I followed one of these...

The P word - skipping or shielding? Is it too early to say the P word? It’s hard not to think about it in these weeks of reading the...

The choir practice and the packing list It’s Shabbat Shira - the parasha in which we read the Song of the Sea, Shirat HaYam - sung first...

There’s a thrill in writing about parashat Bereishit. We may have read it dozens of times before, but the epic words with which our...