Given that our lives can be upended in an instant, Rabbi Cosgrove exhorts us to make every day count, taking on personal agency through teshuvah/repentance, tefillah/spiritual living, and tzedakah/righteous giving.

What does eating apples and honey on Rosh Hashanah mean to you? Rabbi Cosgrove suggests several possible explanations to consider and discuss over the holidays.

Occasion(s) / Rosh Hashanah

Jewish law differentiates between ideal and nonideal situations. Rabbi Witkovsky uses this distinction to help us navigate the nonideal world in which we find ourselves. We must choose the values that are truly important to us and fight for them.

Occasion(s) / Rosh Hashanah

Judaism has survived periods of calamity because visionary leaders have transformed Jewish life to accommodate changed circumstances.

Occasion(s) / Erev Rosh Hashanah

The pandemic has contracted our horizons and cost us innumerable losses, but we can still find hope and meaning in what we do. Rabbi Cosgrove encourages us to find and create beauty and joy even within the smaller scale of our lives.

Occasion(s) / Rosh Hashanah

Let me tell you, it’s never been easy to be the rabbi of Park Avenue Synagogue, beginning with our founding rabbi, Edward Benjamin Morris Browne.

Occasion(s) / Rosh Hashanah

If our synagogue’s present construction serves as any indication, then on that first Shabbat of Creation, when the good Lord stepped back to behold the divine handiwork, the wi-fi was nowhere near close to being hooked up.

Occasion(s) / Rosh Hashanah

There are people, explains the Talmud, who koneh olamo b’sha·ah ehat (Avodah Zarah 10b), who “acquire eternity in a moment,” and for Joseph Welch, that moment occurred on June 9, 1954. The context was a post-war America unnerved by fears of Communist influence and sub...

Occasion(s) / Yom Kippur, Yizkor

Yizkor is an opportunity for gratitude and love along with sadness.

Occasion(s) / Kol Nidrei

Rabbi Cosgrove challenges us to step up to the ideal of Yom Kippur, to commit to acting to mend our world, our community, and our personal relationships.

Occasion(s) / Yom Kippur, Yizkor

This summer marked the seventieth anniversary of the reinterment of Theodor Herzl in Israel. Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, died in 1904 at the age of forty-four.

Occasion(s) / Yom Kippur, Kol Nidrei

In retrospect . . . those college students . . . they never stood a chance.