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IKAR Podcasts

IKAR

Sermons, talks, classes, and more from IKAR Rabbis and the IKAR community.

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  • 32 episodes
  • Avg 41 min
  • English

Episodes 32

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  • Sunday · 55 min

    To Live and Love Well Not in Spite of Death, But Because of It - Rabbi Sharon Brous & Dr. BJ Miller | Rosh Hashanah II

    Palliative care specialist BJ Miller helps patients and families face illness and death realistically, comfortably, and on their own terms. Miller is cultivating a model for palliative care organizations around the world, and emphasizing healthcare’s quixotic relationship to the inevitability of death. He is a hospice and palliative medicine physician and sees patients and families via telehealth at Mettle Health, a company he co-founded with the aim to provide personalized, holistic consultations for any patient or caregiver who needs help navigating the many practical, emotional and communication issues that come with serious or chronic illness, end of life and disability. Miller’s passion for palliative care stems from personal experience -- a shock sustained while a Princeton undergraduate cost him three limbs and nearly killed him. But his experiences form the foundation of a hard-won empathy for patients who are running out of time. Let’s Begin at the End: Learning to Live and Love Well Not in Spite of Death, But Because of It. A conversation between Rabbi Sharon Brous and Dr. BJ Miller on Rosh Hashanah II.

  • Sunday · 9 min

    Avinu Malkeinu | Rosh Hashanah II

    "We've tried everything, and we nonetheless fear that it just wasn't enough. Now we are here standing before you with no more plays in the playbook. There's nothing more we can do, and we just hope that you can be satisfied with what we were able to fix and forgive us for the rest. Avinu Malkeinu, show us mercy, answer us, not because we're beyond saving, but because we're trying." Intro provided by rabbinic intern Jacob Schatz.

  • September 6 · 13 min

    Taller On The Inside - Rabbi Deborah Silver

    The High Holyday liturgy is full of images of emptiness and abasement, as if to tell us, “You got nothing.” How does this week’s parashah, always read just before the High Holydays, put itself into conversation with Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur?

  • August 30 · 15 min

    Read it both ways  - Rabbi Candice Levy

    Ki Tavo offers a theology of reward and punishment, of cause and effect, but lived experience teaches us that the world does not work so neatly. What becomes possible when we read the parashah forwards and backwards, not only as protest against injustice, but also as a guide to rebuilding a shattered world?

  • August 30 · 1 hr

    Rabbi Sharon Brous and Daniela Gerson discuss "The Wanderers"

    Part genealogical detective story, part gripping history, part contemporary reporting on war-torn territories, The Wanderers - A Story of Exile, Survival, and Unexpected Love in the Shadow of World War II, chronicles Daniela’s journey to unearth this past and reveal its echoes in still-contested lands from Ukraine to Israel.

  • August 28 · 1 hr 1 min

    IKAR High Holy Days Bootcamp 5787

    Grab a glass of grape juice or wine and a comfy chair, and join your rabbis for a launch of the season. We’ll cover many of the High Holy Day basics (What can I expect if I’m coming for the first time? Wait, another Amidah? And which service do I wear white to?), along with some of the most perplexing questions of the season (Remind me why we’re doing all this? Why does September feel like a marathon? Is teshuvah really possible?). We’ll do our best to connect, elucidate, and elaborate in 90 minutes or less.

  • August 16 · 21 min

    The Relentless Pursuit of Peace - Rabbi Sharon Brous

    I hunger for a leadership with the moral seriousness, the moral imagination to recognize that the greatest achievement is not brute force and military victory, but the embrace and affirmation of human life. Of peace.

  • August 9 · 14 min

    Between Two Mountains - Rabbi Tova Leibovic-Douglas

    What happens when we have the courage to really see what is before us—the blessing, the curse, and everything in between? Re’eh invites us to look up, pay attention, and enter Elul and this season with our eyes and hearts wide open.

  • August 2 · 18 min

    Perhaps The Word Was For Me - Rabbi Morris Panitz

    From the broken brotherhoods of Genesis to the final conversation between Moses and Aaron, the Torah asks what it truly means to become our brother's keeper. Through a relationship shaped by speech, silence, conflict, and compassion, a vision emerges of how even fractured relationships can find redemption when truth remains bound to love.

  • July 26 · 15 min

    Say it Anyway - Rabbi Hannah Jensen

    ASL Interpretation for this sermon is available on YouTube. In this week's parsha we read that Moses pleads with God, and the form of that word (va'etchanan) only shows up in one other place in the Torah - with Joseph. What do these two moments come to teach us about yearning for things we may never get? Why is it important that we articulate those desires anyway?

  • July 19 · 15 min

    The Dust and the Stars - Rabbinic Intern Jacob Schatz

    The book of Deuteronomy has begun, and our people are as numerous as the stars in the sky. But Moses cries out, “Eikhah!” The famous heart-broken “how” that foreshadows the tragedies of Tisha B’Av. What mournful message does Moses see in the stars? And what, instead, can we learn from the dust?

  • July 14 · 1 hr 30 min

    Rabbis and Prophets: The Challenge of the Moral Critic - Rabbi Sharon Brous and Donniel Hartman

    Join Donniel Hartman and Rabbi Sharon Brous at the Shalom Hartman Institute for a profoundly honest and challenging conversation on the moral responsibility of Jewish leadership today. Together, they explore the complexities of holding onto faith and hope in a world facing overlapping crises—from climate change and the rise of AI to political extremism and the disturbing normalization of violence and antisemitism. Drawing on the teachings of the prophet Micah, Brous and Hartman share what keeps them up at night and where they find reasons to be optimistic. They delve into the crucial difference between winning the war in the Middle East vs. maintaining a moral standing on the global stage, the necessity of truthtelling within the Jewish community, and the controversial debate over the utility of the label "Zionist" in contemporary political discourse. This discussion is an essential watch for anyone grappling with identity, community, and the ongoing struggle to build a just and loving world in times of deep uncertainty. Topics Covered: The "polycrisis" of our time: Climate change, AI, and violent extremism. The tension between internal truthtelling and external public relations. What it means to drop a "sea anchor" when facing waves of fear and anti-Semitism. Why the words we use matter, and the growing debate over the term "Zionism".

  • July 14 · 16 min

    Choose Mercy Before Vengeance Chooses Us - Rabbi Morris Panitz

    What happens when the man who once found refuge forgets the power of mercy? Drawing together Moses' flight to Midian, the cities of refuge, and one of the Torah's most difficult passages, we discover an enduring challenge to break the cycle of vengeance before it breaks us.

  • June 28 · 18 min

    Rabbi Sharon Brous and Reverend Raphael Warnock in Conversation

    Join Rabbi Sharon Brous in conversation with Raphael Warnock, Baptist pastor and senator from Georgia, to discuss his new book The Crooked Places Made Straight: Reflections on the Moral Meaning of America. Join us on June 27 during services, virtually and in-person. Senator Reverend Raphael G. Warnock is a transformational voice in Congress and the pastor of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, and for the semiquincentennial of America, he exhorts us to reach for the highest and noblest aspects of our national character. Senator Warnock argues that we suffer not from a paucity of resources but from a poverty of moral imagination.

  • June 28 · 28 min

    Guest Sermon from Reverend Raphael Warnock

    Senator Reverend Raphael G. Warnock is a transformational voice in Congress and the pastor of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, and for the semiquincentennial of America, he exhorts us to reach for the highest and noblest aspects of our national character. Senator Warnock argues that we suffer not from a paucity of resources but from a poverty of moral imagination.

  • June 22 · 53 min

    Kissing Girls on Shabbat w/ Dr. Sara Glass + Lani Santo

    A conversation with Dr. Sara Glass, author of Kissing Girls on Shabbat, and Lani Santo, CEO of Footsteps, discussing LGBTQ+ identity, chosen family, and building a self-determined life after leaving ultra-Orthodoxy.

Showing 1–20 of 32 episodes