High Holy Days Sermons 5781/2020
The League of Extraordinary Women
Sarah Aaronson. Minna Weizmann. Anne Frank. Helen Shapiro. Leslie Gore. Hannah Arendt. Barbra Streisand, Ann Brown and Carole King. Featuring Moss Hess and Karl Marx.
We live our lives measuring ourselves against certain standards. We measure ourselves against other lives. Here are some you might have missed. Perhaps looking at women like these, one day others may look to you.
As we learned during Rabbi Sally Priesand’s scholar-in-residence program at our temple, women are ignored in our troubled history. The evidence seems to suggest that Jewish history might have been somewhat less troubled had we listened to people like Sarah Aaronson, the founder and leader of the first extensive spy organization NILI in Palestine 1914-15. Aaronson was the first woman buried with honor as a heroine of the founding of Israel. Others, such as Minna Weizmann and Helen Shapiro also are essentially forgotten, after having changed history.
During this year’s Holyday season, four d’vrei Torah will tell the story of Judaism in the 19th, 20th and 21st Century though these lives. With a look back at Moses Hess and Karl Marx.
May you and your loved ones be inscribed for blessing in the Book Of Life.
A feeling deep in your soul.
Once you were half, now you’re whole.
No more hunger and thirst
But first be a person….
Rabbi Berg’s D’vrei Torah 5781
We live our lives measuring ourselves against certain standards.
We measure ourselves, against other’s lives.
These are some you might have missed.
Perhaps by looking at these women, one day others may look to you.
The League of Extraordinary Women
- Erev Rosh Hashanah - A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Woman.
- Rosh Hashanah Morning - Men. Moses Hess. Karl Marx. Engels.
- Kol Nidre - A League of Their Own. Hess and Streisand.
- Yom Kippur Morning - Spies. Minna Weizmann, Sarah Aaronson, and Hannah Arendt.
In AD 73 or 74 a Roman soldier taking part in the Jewish fortress at Masada wrote a line preserved on a papyrus scrap that the Roman poet Virgil’s Carthaginian Queen Dido spoke to her sister, “Anna, my sister, what dreams terrify me in my anxiety.”
“I’m just like Anne Frank.” Bob Dylan, I Contain Multitudes.
Hannah Arendt - Eichmann in Jerusalem Audiobook
Fanny, the Jewish Spy for Germany in World War I – Jewish Policy Center
Sarah Aaronsohn - Jewish Women's Archive
Arendt & Marx. “I would like to try to rescue Marx’s by The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi - Medium
The Diary of Anne Frank - Act 1
The Diary of Anne Frank - Act 2
Sir Isaiah Berlin - The Life and Opinions of Moses Hess (1/7)
Anne Frank - The Only Known Video
Don’t Rain On My Parade – Barbra Streisand
Aretha Franklin - (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman - Kennedy Center
Helen Shapiro - Please Mr. Postman (1964)