Larchmont Temple Chevra Torah

IF there has been a major focus to all of my teaching, it has been to affirm that a coherent Jewish theology is indispensable as the basis for a Jewish religious identity…I begin theology, then, with the issue of revelation.  I remain convinced that how we deal with this determines how we handle the issue of authority in belief and practice…which determines how we deal with the claims of tradition on us…That opens the gates to a reconsideration of how we understand God, for God is at the heart of Torah….I believe that the function of religion is to discern and describe the sense of an ultimate order that pervades the universe and human experience.  With that sense of an ordered world intact, we humans also have a place—we belong and feel ultimately “at home;” without it we are in exile, “homeless,” and our lives without meaning.  The whole purpose of religion…is to highlight, preserve and concretize this sense of cosmos, and to recapture it in the face of the chaos that perpetually hovers around the fringes of our lives.”