David Wolpe
The Blogs

David Wolpe

Apply for a Blog
Sep 6, 2017, 3:04 AM
Seeing yourself from the outside
I judge myself from the inside. I know how I feel, how complex are my own motivations and ideas. My view of others is different. Especially when they do something I dislike, I often attribute a single motive, idea or personality trait to them. Perhaps for...
Aug 30, 2017, 4:46 PM
The Disease of Conceit
Two hundred years from now, on a fine spring afternoon, scientists look up at the heavens and tell God that it is all over — humans can stand on their own. The scientist says, “Look, God. You were good in your day, but we can...
Aug 23, 2017, 4:31 PM
‘Baruch HaShem,’ Indeed
When you ask a religious Jew how he or she is doing, the answer is likely to be “Baruch HaShem” — blessed be God. Good news often has “Baruch HaShem” added to it as well, as in, “my children are all well, Baruch HaShem.” Baruch...
Aug 16, 2017, 5:08 PM
No More Fear of Fleeing
From George Prochnik’s award-winning biography of Stefan Zweig, “The Impossible Exile”: “One day in the 1920s when Zweig happened to be traveling to Germany with Otto Zarek, the two men stopped off to visit an exhibition of antique furniture at a museum in Munich. After...
Aug 9, 2017, 6:59 PM
A Conflict Of Rights
Most ethical dilemmas, like most tragedies, are not a conflict of right and wrong but a conflict of rights. People want different, competing and sometimes worthy things that cannot coexist. The authors of “The Federalist Papers” knew this well. When James Madison writes that “the...
Aug 2, 2017, 4:09 PM
After Tisha b’Av…
This past week, all across the world, Jews mourned the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. And they blamed themselves. Yes, there are passages in Jewish literature that excoriate the nations who carried out the destruction. There are even passages that express anger at God....
Jul 26, 2017, 6:44 PM
Hands To Work, Hearts To God
A favorite saying of the Rabbis of Yavneh, told in the Talmud, was: “I am God’s creature and my fellow is God’s creature. My work is in the town and his work is in the country. I rise early for my work and he rises...
Jul 19, 2017, 8:00 PM
The Gift Of Goodness
We are a society geared toward the gifted. We have programs to enhance people’s natural endowments, special training and tutoring, early identification of people with talent or intelligence. Of course it makes sense; innovators and artists and thinkers should be given opportunities to grow their...
Jul 12, 2017, 4:19 PM
Listen Up
Deuteronomy is the great book of listening. We live in a visual time; our age is saturated with images. Everyone’s cellphone carries a camera and can document the sights of our lives. But over and over in the first chapters of Deuteronomy, we read the...
Jul 6, 2017, 8:14 PM
Open Doors
In his famous parable “Before the Law,” Kafka writes about a man who stands before a door designated only for him, but dies without entering. A very different spirit from Kafka, Ralph Waldo Emerson, nonetheless anticipated the existentialist by writing: “Men live on the brink...
Load more
About Me
Named the most influential Rabbi in America by Newsweek Magazine and one of the 50 most influential Jews in the world by the Jerusalem Post, David Wolpe is the Rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, California.