Rabbi Stephen Lewis Fuchs
Blog
When I rolled into the gym this morning, I was hoping to get on my favorite recumbent bike. It allows me to do a good lower body work out without using my arms or putting any stress on my right shoulder, which is recovering from rotator cuff surgery.
No such luck.
Both of “my” bikes were taken.
The gym’s rules are prominently posted throughout: “30-minute limit on all machines when others are waiting.”
A young woman was toweling herself off on one of the bikes, so I asked her if she was finishing or just starting.
“Just starting,” she answered...
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Havdalah isn’t much fun when I’m by myself, but I do it anyway.
My wife, Vickie, was in San Francisco for Thanksgiving weekend, visiting her 97-year old mother, our children, and four grandchildren who live there.
My duties as rabbi of Bat Yam Temple of the Islands in Sanibel, FL, kept me home for the holiday. We don’t like to be apart on holidays, but given the realistic possibilities, we made the best choice. It’s vital for Vickie to spend as much time with her mother as possible, and every time either of us sees our children and grandchildren, it’s a great joy.
I...
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“My mother made me a scientist without ever intending it. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school: ‘So? Did you learn anything today?’ But not my mother. She always asked me a different question. ‘Izzy,’ she would say, ‘did you ask a good question today?’ That difference – asking good questions – made me become a scientist!” -- Isidor I. Rabi, Nobel laureate
As we begin to read the Torah again each year on Simchat Torah, I am reminded of my first rabbinical assignment.
A first year student at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of...
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Each year, the voice that speaks to my soul about the stark contrast between the inward focus of Yom Kippur and the outward thrust of Sukkot grows louder and louder.
Yom Kippur is all about quiet and contemplation. Sukkot is about building and action.
Yom Kippur asks us to look at ourselves. Sukkot asks us to look at the world.
Tradition teaches that after we rise from our Yom Kippur introspection and eat a bit, we should go outside and hammer the first nail into our sukkah (a small outdoor hut, open to the sky, used during Sukkot).
The sukkah represents the...
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“Hayom harat Olam!” “This is the day of the world’s birth,” we proclaim each time we hear the shofar’s blast. It is the central message of Rosh HaShanah, the Jewish new year: to celebrate the teachings and ideals of Genesis’ magnificent creation story.
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” our Torah begins, so many ask: How could God have created the world in seven days? What about the dinosaurs and evolution? Don’t we believe in that?
Of course we believe in that! The creation story in Genesis does not offer a scientific account of how the world was...
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