Rabbi Gail Fisher

Light. It’s all about light at this time of year in the northern hemisphere. Our hours of daylight are fewer and fewer. We can well...

I was reading a book over this past Shabbat and came across a reference to Deuteronomy 11:10-12, so I looked that up. It says: 10For the...

The long fall holiday season is over now, close to 60 days of suspended time when we were seeking forgiveness from our friends and...

“Come for 15 minutes of prayer and meditation,” the announcement said, “during the Ten Days of Awe in our sanctuary.” I have not been in...

Yesterday, I was reading the parasha for this week (וָֽאֶתְחַנַּ֖ן Deuteronomy 3:23 – 7:11) and found myself taking screenshot after...

I had just finished leading a Friday night service at one of my retirement communities. As usual, the congregants were about half Jewish...

The Torah portion for this week is Naso, from the book of Numbers. It is best known for the sudden, shocking death of Aaron’s two sons,...

I am going to write in the first person here because I will not presume to speak of your personal experience of this pandemic. But maybe...

My grandchildren love to have me watch them play video games. (And now that we’re all kept apart from one another, I really miss those...

We are living in turbulent times. We don’t know whether we are being alarmist or whether we are being too complacent in the face of...

I have always believed that I grew up in a shtetl, maybe one of the last remaining ones. I first wrote about this 40 years ago when I was...

Our parasha for this week, Vayechi, shows at length a truly beautiful deathbed scene. Jacob is ill (Midrash says that he was the first...

It's so lovely to be back in Genesis and reading all of the old, well-loved tales of our ancestors! Last week was Jacob and the ladder...

One of my colleagues has reminded me of how many occasions there are this month for us to ponder seriously. The first significant day in...

We are halfway through the month of Elul and so the High Holydays are looming in the immediate future. The years seem to go by so fast...

“Arise, cry out in the night, at the beginning of the watches! Pour out your heart like water before the presence of the Lord; lift up...

I recently returned from 10 days in Jerusalem, studying at the Shalom Hartman Institute but also having a few hours here and there to do...

A study partner and I are working our way through a book on how to interpret midrash, the stories in the Talmud and in other old sources...

This is really an exciting time of the year! I can’t even decide what to emphasize in my sermons this month. Consider what is going on:...

Yesterday morning, I gave a presentation at a retirement center about the holiday of Passover. I talked about how the teaching is that we...