Rabbi David Wolpe

The Omer marks the 50 days traveling the desert from Egypt to Sinai. It also marks the wave offering of the Temple on the second day of Passover. The wave offering was a measure of flour made from the first sheaves of barley grain that had been reaped.

Passover is known as the festival of freedom. But it might also be known as the holiday of love.

What was the most depressing condition of Egyptian slavery in the Torah? According to the Belzer Rebbe, the Israelites suffered most deeply not from slavery itself but from...

In the Bible God exiles Adam and Eve and declares that they will never be permitted to return to the Garden. If God's intention was to assure that humanity would be forever exiled from Eden, why did God not destroy the Garden? After all it seems the experiment was a...

Do you hover? Is your child's each vibration a source of concern to you? Honestly, do you harbor the suspicion that, without your patient, constant guidance, your teenager, or toddler, or ten year old, will topple into the abyss and never recover? In other words, was the term "helicopter...

In the Bible, we are warned that none can see the face of God. There is danger in God's exaltedness; to presume to look upon the Divine is to court destruction.

Yet at the end of the Bible, we are told that Moses saw God panim...

In Gulliver's Travels, Gulliver looks at his watch so often that his hosts the Brobdingnagians think he is consulting his god. In the first decades of the last century the historian of civilization's presumed decline, Oswald Spengler, pointed out that human beings had become obsessive clock watchers, mesmerized by that...

In the Bible, Jacob cries, Joseph cries, David cries. God says to a repentant Hezekiah, "I have heard your prayer, I have seen your tears" (Isaiah 38:4).

Repeatedly in the Bible, figures of great strength, figures of faith, pour out their souls in tears. The baby Moses...

Dear God,

Moses, placed in the basket by the river, kept silent, too frightened to cry.

Abraham, walking up the mountain with Isaac, kept silent, refusing to give way to the wild sounds of his own grief.

When Aaron's children were taken from him, Aaron was silent for there were...

Editor's note: There is a great Jewish tradition to dedicate the 29 days in the month of Elul to study and prepare for the coming high holy days. The time is supposed to challenge us to use each day as an opportunity for growth and discovery. On each of

I used to write books. Now, I write Facebooks. Somehow it is not the same.

There was a time when being sequestered in a room was not that difficult. When I wrote my first book there was nothing really on TV at 3 am. Netflix was...

Who could defend sacrificing animals? Really. Isn't it just barbaric and shouldn't we admit that it is a primitive relic of an ignorant time? As someone who has not eaten chicken or meat for decades, I would nonetheless like to speak up on behalf of sacrifice.

Much...

If you were asked to point to the place in the world that contains the greatest mystery, where would you point?

You might point down. There are sermons in stones, the poet Wordsworth tells us, and one could choose the marvels of the earth. The molten core, the shifting plates,...

Growing up, anti-Semitism was a constant topic of discussion. When I became a Rabbi more than two decades ago, I thought we were done. Jew hatred was the attention grabbing remnant of an earlier world. We had moved on -- Judaism was now about who we are, not about what...

Terrence Malick's new film "Tree of Life" opens with a quotation from Job. That quotation holds the key to the film and in some sense, the key to our attitude toward life.

In Job 38: 4,7 God asks Job "Where were you when I laid the foundations...

The end time in Jewish tradition is often depicted as a time of strife, of the wars of Gog and Magog, of what the rabbis called picturesquely "the birth pangs of the Messiah." Images of resurrection (based on scattered passages such as Daniel chapter 12) and an awakening of the...

In the ancient world, what was the traditional attitude towards power? When the son of Persian King Cyrus, Cambyses, himself became King, he wanted to marry his sister. He called in the royal judges to inquire whether there was a law permitting this practice. They came back and said they...

The heart of the Passover Seder is a summary of Israelite history to be recited as the citizen presents the first fruits. It would be as if on tax day we would say "And the pilgrims came from a far away land" and recite American history before offering taxes in...

How can we pray if there are things in prayer we do not believe?

Many people treat prayer like a treatise, picking through the book for doctrinal points. While we should not assert things we do not believe, prayer is not philosophy. Prayer is poetry. The sound of the...

How harmless is it to post an article about why people should read the bible on a site devoted to religion? I did on this very page, and it evoked more than 2,000 responses, most of them angry. I had previously written a similarly gentle article about how God should...

Why should we continue to study the Bible? That is not a question if you consider it the unalterable word of God. But for those who are uncertain, there is another powerful reason to pore over this sacred text.

Everything has changed since biblical times -- language,...