Sermons: Shemot

The Necessity of Teaching Our Children Passover and International Holocaust Day

Bo | Rabbi Michael Siegel | February 1, 2025

The Necessity of Teaching Our Children Passover and International Holocaust Day Rabbi Michael S. Siegel February 1, 2025 It was the moment that our people had been waiting for, for hundreds of years. The plagues had devastated Egypt, and the God of Israel had shown beyond a shadow of a doubt who the true divinity was.  Continue Reading »

Tetzaveh: The Clothing of Deception, The Clothing that Reveals

Tetzaveh | Rabbi Michael Siegel | February 12, 2022

Aliana is my first Bat Mitzvah with Panamanian roots, so in her honor and that of her family, both here in Chicago and those in Panama, I thought to speak this morning about something that had to do with Panama.  My problem is that my knowledge of Panama is limited.  Truth be told, the only Continue Reading »

Terumah: Keeping the Menorah Lit: The Danger of the “A” Word: Apartheid

Terumah | Rabbi Michael Siegel | February 5, 2022

How well do you visualize?  When someone tells you about something that is going to be remodeled, and they say, Well, we are going to take this wall down and move this couch here, a chair there.  We are going to change the color from this to this.  Of course, we are changing the light Continue Reading »

Mishpatim: Repro Shabbat

Mishpatim | Rabbi Michael Siegel | January 29, 2022

Back in the old country, back in the day of our great-great-grandparents, they knew the word “America”, but more often than not, the term that they used for this country was the goldinah medinah.  The golden land, a place so rich that the streets are paved with gold. But when they arrived in this country, Continue Reading »

The Danger of a Post-Truth America

Yitro | Rabbi Michael Siegel | February 6, 2021

The Danger of a Post-Truth America I want to begin with a Midrash, a Rabbinic teaching, about our Torah reading this morning which, while composed well over a thousand years ago, could have easily been written today: “When Moses was engaged in writing the Torah, he had to write the work of each day of Continue Reading »

Institution: The Symphony of Society

Terumah | Rabbi Michael Siegel | February 29, 2020

A quotation that has great meaning for me comes Yohan Wolfgang von Goethe, a great German writer and statesman. He once said: Music is liquid architecture; architecture is frozen music. Goethe suggested that in the same way that great music can touch our souls and transform us, great architecture can shape us, our world view Continue Reading »