Subscribe to URJ President Rabbi Rick Jacobs' weekly podcast.
Tune in weekly to hear Rabbi Rick Jacobs, President of the Union For Reform Judaism, offer (insights into the weekly Torah portion) to help open up Jewish thought and its contemporary influence on your life. Subscribe now and find transcripts in the episode pages below.
After four years of bringing you a new episode nearly every week, this podcast is taking a little break. Listen to this episode to learn more about our hiatus and where to find us in the meantime.
Most of us today aren’t tasked with wandering through the desert, like the ancient Israelites were... but we still find plenty to kvetch about! What if, instead of focusing on small annoyances, we turned to community-building and togetherness? This episode first aired in May 2018.
Parashat Naso, the longest of all the Torah portions, features a famous blessing – but what does it mean for us to bless one another?
Parashat Naso includes a passage about the sotah, the "errant woman" who is accused of adultery. It's a complex and problematic part of ancient Judaism, says Rabbi Rick Jacobs, so sometimes it's deliberately avoided. In this episode, though, which originally aired in June 2019, we deliberatly dive into figuring out what it means to us today.
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Chag Sameach and welcome to a special Shavuot edition of On the Other Hand! On this week’s holiday episode, Rabbi Rick Jacobs talks about Ruth, her connection to this unique Jewish festival, and what her story of unity and bridge-building means for us as we celebrate Shavuot today.
The Torah commands us to take a census of the “whole Israelite community” – but who does the counting, and who, exactly, is counted?
How much do you care about the environment? Yourself? Other people? Rabbi Rick Jacobs talks about our fundamental responsibility to care for God’s earth and attend to the neediest among us. It’s not a newfangled, 21st-century idea; it’s literally what our age-old biblical text calls for.
