I want to talk to you this morning about a baseball player whose story is at one and the same time an utterly unique baseball story, applicable to no one else in this sanctuary, and an utterly universal human story, applicable in a different way to everyone here this morning.

Rabbi Harold Kushner has given over 50 years’ worth of sermons. But his favorite sermon, and in his own opinion his best sermon, had to do with a certain Kiddush cup.

What is it like to walk around with a big secret, something about you that cuts to your core that you do not want other people to know?

I have been saying Kaddish for my mother and mother in love every day. One of the glories of Kaddish is that it creates a space for me to free associate different stories.

A man named Chip Crowley was in his 60s when he went to see his doctor for his yearly physical. His doctor did not like what he saw. Mr. Crowley was 40 pounds overweight. He never exercised. He made poor nutrition choices.

There is a woman in our congregation, a great grandmother, who is a force of nature. Every year she spends four weeks teaching Israeli children in Tel Aviv how to speak English.

Do you remember the moment, Sunday night, Super Bowl 51, when hopelessness, against all odds, gave way to hope?

When I first got to our shul 20 years ago, at Kiddush one of our long-term members shared his reaction to the sermon I had given that morning. He said: “All too often, a sermon is a long answer to a question no one is asking.” …

This past fall two things have happened, and I am working on figuring out the connection between them.

The first is that, within the last two months, Shira and I have both …

In 1965, in rural Louisiana, a man named Lee Sherman got a job at a chemical plant named Pittsburgh Plate Glass, which manufactures paints, chemicals and coatings. Over the course of 15 years working there, Lee Sherman would become …