William Hamilton

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Apr 25, 2025, 5:24 PM

“The Prophets of the Bible called out wrongs. They held nothing back when they criticized those who misled.” A grad student had this to say to me a few years ago. He was eager to engage me in his...

Apr 18, 2025, 5:48 PM

”All of us,” 50-year-old Avida said 17 months ago while recovering in a Tel Aviv hospital. “All of us, we think that the time is going on until the end. But the time, it’s really short. And I told...

Apr 11, 2025, 5:39 PM

Searching for Vocabulary

“It’s getting harder to describe what’s happening around us,” a fellow-learner recently said. She added, “It's like we’ve lost a vocabulary for talking about what we’re living through. Kind of like all the terms have been used-up.” She wasn’t just...

Apr 4, 2025, 5:40 PM

A Serenity Prayer with a Jewish Accent

It’s known as the Serenity Prayer. "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." Yes, it’s about limitations, distinctions, and...

Mar 28, 2025, 6:00 PM

“I remember that everybody was trying to protect you. And I’m learning today that you experienced that as one of the great difficulties of that time” journalist Haviv Rettig-Gur recently said to Shaked Haran. We met her last week....

Mar 21, 2025, 5:09 PM

“Look at all of us sitting here. This is how he would have wanted the scenario to end” Shaked Haran tells of the most poignant of moments. Her mother, released from Hamas’s harmful captivity, first learns that her husband...

Mar 14, 2025, 4:34 PM

Right-sizing your ideals

“But what about your hope?” a sincere fellow-learner asked me recently. We were sharing coffee. Discussing the prospects for a conflict-solution in Israel’s neighborhood. I’d shared my position with him, that it required a massive identity-overhaul for Palestinians that would...

Mar 7, 2025, 5:51 PM

‘You cannot build a true future from a false past’

Our own stories get used against us. Gifted journalist Matti Friedman recently made this observation, when he noted how our enemies turn us against ourselves. The result? We get remade into the villains of our own stories. The Pharaohs...

Feb 28, 2025, 5:31 PM

Powerless or Compassionate-Power

A visit last week to the Tel Aviv Art Museum revealed two works that evoke Jewish powerlessness. One from 2023’s Nova Festival Massacre. Another from 1945 of a kneeled, desperate woman called Longing. The curator’s choice to put them...

Feb 21, 2025, 5:42 PM

70

How can forces that threaten to break me, remake me? This question, posed earlier this week by a friend in Jerusalem, is rummaging through my heart this morning. And I’m sure you know why. Our enemies continue to redraw the...

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About Me

Rabbi William Hamilton has served as rabbi (mara d'atra) of Kehillath Israel in Brookline, MA since 1995.