Congregation Beth Israel

Hatred happens every day. Vile words, destructive acts, and divisive headlines are the norm. We adjust ourselves to it by dodging literal and figurative bullets. And we hide to protect ourselves because the price of doing anything less feels too high. It comes at the expense of reaching out to others whom we don’t know, and it deprives us of changing with and adapting to the...

Freedom is an ideal we constantly strive to reach. In 1986, when he received the Nobel Peace Prize, Elie Wiesel said, “As long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be true. As long as one child is hungry, our life will be filled with anguish and shame. What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, th...

I’m the senior rabbi at Congregation Beth Israel, organized in 1854, the oldest synagogue in Texas. Years ago, Beth Israel’s leadership approached me to ask if we should build a perimeter fence around our property.

At first I said no. I frequently reminded them that we are par...