Oren J. Hayon

Rabbi Oren J. Hayon is associate rabbi of Temple Emanu-El in Dallas, Texas. He received his undergraduate education at Rice University, and received rabbinical ordination from the Cincinnati campus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in 2004.

There Are No Good Old Days

D'Var Torah By: Oren J. Hayon

August 28, 2013
We have arrived finally at Parashat Haazinu, the last speech Moses will make to his people and the penultimate installment of his conversation with us from miles and centuries away. When we resume the plot of Deuteronomy on Simchat Torah (after next week's special festival reading for Sukkot), Moses's poetry...

Moses’s Death, God’s Breath

D'Var Torah By: Oren J. Hayon

August 27, 2013
Death closes all: but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done, Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods. (Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "Ulysses," Poems, vol. 2, 1842) * * * Before the birth of virtually every significant male character in the Bible, extraordinary tales are...

Father of Multitudes

D'Var Torah By: Oren J. Hayon

August 27, 2013
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.) Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself" One principle that remains reliably true throughout the Bible is that the fruitful production of children is evidence of God's love and providence for favored and faithful humans. The...

Strange Fruit

D'Var Torah By: Oren J. Hayon

August 9, 2013
After seeing the infamous 1930 photograph by Lawrence Beitler, which depicts the mob lynching of two young black men, a Jewish high school teacher named Abel Meeropol wrote a haunting poem titled "Strange Fruit." The poem was first published in 1936 in The New York Teacher, a union magazine. Later...

Standing Together, Standing Apart

D'Var Torah By: Oren J. Hayon

August 5, 2013
The Hebrew month of Elul invites us into a period of preparatory self-reflection and contemplation, calling us to center our thoughts on our own t'shuvah. Elul culminates in the observance of S'lichot, a time of penitential prayer and meditation when we ready ourselves for the spiritual labor of the Days...