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Rabbis' Sermons
To select the sermons of an individual Rabbi click on the box and then on his name.
January 14, 2012
Rabbi Cosgrove
Parashat Shemot
Last Saturday night, like the spies sent by Moses, I boarded a plane to scout out the land of Israel. I have been to Israel more times than I can count and I have lived there on and off during my life. I have been there with our congregation three times in the past two years and I was actually there just two weeks ago to visit my...
January 07, 2012
Rabbi Cosgrove
Parashat Va-y’hi
If you have ever flown El Al to Israel, as I did last week and will do again this evening, then you are familiar with its marketing motto, “It’s not just an airline, it’s Israel.” As the six Cosgroves piled into our seats, I reflected on the motto, “How very true – truer I bet than their...
December 17, 2011
Rabbi Cosgrove
Parashat Va-yeishev
Two weeks have passed since a series of videos produced by the Israeli Ministry of Absorption caused American Jewry to collectively bristle at the suggestion that Jewish life in America is so thin that the children of Israeli ex-pats living in America will, if they stay in America, assimilate into the melting pot of...
December 03, 2011
Rabbi Cosgrove
Parashat Va-yetzei
From a historical perspective, there is nothing terribly surprising about the ethical failings we read about every day in the paper. Insider trading, phone hacking, influence peddling, steroids in sports, high school cheating scandals. We are momentarily aghast when we first hear these stories, but then, into the vacuum of our...
November 26, 2011
Rabbi Cosgrove
Parashat Tol’dot
To sit down at a large family Thanksgiving dinner is to experience the pleasures and pressures of family dynamics…on steroids. All of our familial idiosyncrasies, fissures, and history are brought together around a single table for an exclusive one night engagement. Everyone’s behavior becomes the subject of...
October 21, 2011
Rabbi Cosgrove
Parashat B’reishit
For reasons that are too strange to get into, I had the odd pleasure this past week of eating lunch with one of the nation’s most prominent statisticians from the University of Chicago. Over the course of the meal, he shared with me the results of a study he conducted early in his career on risk management education...
October 14, 2011
Rabbi Cosgrove
Shabbat hol ha-moed Sukkot 5772
Before Oscar Handlin, there was one dominant narrative of American self-understanding – the frontier experience. From the Colonial “errand into the wilderness” to Daniel Boone’s trip west, to Lewis and Clark’s explorations, to Huck and Jim on the Mississippi, to Jack Kerouac’s...
October 07, 2011
Rabbi Cosgrove
Yom Kippur 5772
This past year, I had the opportunity to visit the Menachem Begin Museum in Jerusalem. In learning of Begin’s legacy, I was fascinated to discover that when asked to identify his greatest achievement, Begin did not mention the signing of the Camp David Peace Accords, the bombing of the Osirak-Iraqi nuclear reactor, his...
October 03, 2011
Rabbi Cosgrove
Shabbat Shuvah/ParashatHa’azinu
Next time you are on Lexington Avenue, I want you to stop to appreciate the beautiful church that sits between 75th and 76th – the church of St. Jean Baptiste. Over the past few years I have attended a variety of interfaith meetings there, not to mention dropping my children off at the Broadway...
September 28, 2011
Rabbi Cosgrove
Rosh Hashanah 5772
Precisely 70 years ago, on September 29 and 30, 1941, the single most horrific and infamous mass killing of the Holocaust occurred at Babi Yar. It is an altogether sobering thought that during these hours that we gather in our holiday finest, seventy years ago, nearly 34,000 of our people were gathered together in a ravine...
September 27, 2011
Rabbi Cosgrove
Erev Rosh Hashanah 5772
As we greet the New Year, I want to welcome each and every one of you. May we all be inscribed in the Book of Life for a year of health and happiness. For me, this Rosh Hashanah is especially sweet as for the very first time, I get to welcome both my parents and my in-laws to celebrate Rosh Hashanah together. Mom, Dad...
September 23, 2011
Rabbi Cosgrove
Parashat Nitzavim/Va-yeilekh
In terms of Biblical prooftexts for supporting Israel, some of the most famous are found in today’s Torah and haftarah reading. L’ma’an tziyon lo eheshe, u-l’ma’an yerushalayim lo eshkot, “For the sake of Zion I will not be silent, for the sake of Jerusalem, I will not be...
September 09, 2011
Rabbi Cosgrove
Parashat Ki Tetzei
9/11 has bequeathed to us a huge range of responses, as numerous and varied as we, the diverse humanity living in the wake of the tragedy. For many, perhaps many in this room, the loss, the grief, the mourning continues. This week, I spoke to one member of our community who lost her husband in the towers. Words still fail her,...
June 08, 2011
Rabbi Cosgrove
Shavuot – Yizkor
It makes sense that of the 613 commandments, we would be inclined to pay special attention to the first one and the last one. The great twelfth-century sage Moses Maimonides, in his sefer ha-mitzvot, tallied up all the commandments derived from the five books of the Torah. The first mitzvah – first according to...
June 03, 2011
Rabbi Cosgrove
Parashat Naso
Thirty years ago, a teacher of mine, Ed Greenstein of Tel Aviv University, suggested a fascinating theory regarding the biblical figure of Samson. Destined in utero for greatness as Israel’s savior, Samson would grow up to be an irresponsible and uncontrollable Hebraic Rob Roy. Unlike the other Judges of Israel, Samson never...
May 21, 2011
Rabbi Cosgrove
Parashat B’hukkotai
According to the Jewish calendar we are in the midst of the sefirah, which means “counting,” specifically the days between Passover and Shavuot. If you are unfamiliar with the observance, also called “counting the omer,” the mitzvah involves nothing more and nothing less than counting each day...
May 06, 2011
Rabbi Cosgrove
Parashat Emor
For Israelis, and perhaps the Jewish community at large, the most significant obituary issued this past week may not be the one that you are thinking of. While the world was waking up to the news from Pakistan, my dear colleague, Rabbi Zuckerman, had slipped the obituary of Judge Moshe Landau under my office door. Moshe Landau, the...
April 29, 2011
Rabbi Cosgrove
Parashat K’doshim
Over the past decades, our public discourse has provided a catalog of pithy rhetoric, phrases that in a few words capture much broader cultural conversations. “Read my lips, no new taxes,” said George Bush the father in 1988. “Can we all get along?” asked Rodney King in the LA race riots of 1992....
April 18, 2011
Rabbi Cosgrove
Passover 5771
To the degree that I understand Nietzsche at all, I am pretty sure he wrote something very interesting about the long term effects of slavery. He coined a term in French – ressentiment – that to the best of what I can tell is closely related to what you or I would call resentment. He used the term in his book On the...
March 25, 2011
Rabbi Cosgrove
Parashat Shemini/Shabbat Parah
I have a friend, who, for the purposes of discussion, we shall call David. David is the son of a Holocaust survivor; he grew up Orthodox, and is a fiercely proud Jew. Passover Seders with David are always fun – he knows every word by heart, can sing every song in Hebrew, and is always off-key. To say that David...
March 12, 2011
Rabbi Cosgrove
Parashat Va-yikra
Bess Myerson was born with two attributes for which she could take no credit: her Jewish name – at the time, a liability; and her good looks – an ongoing blessing. Myerson was the first, and to date, the only, Jewish Miss America, and historians understand her winning the title in 1945 as a watershed moment for many...
February 26, 2011
Rabbi Cosgrove
Va-yak·hel
Abraham Isaac Kook (1865 – 1935) was one of the most influential rabbinic personalities of the Twentieth century. He was the Rabbi of Jaffa in 1904, then became the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, and eventually, the first Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi of the British Mandate of Palestine. With the offices he held, his voice in...
February 12, 2011
Rabbi Cosgrove
Parashat T’tzavveh
This past week, February 9 to be exact, marked the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Confederate States of America, with Jefferson Davis, a former US Army officer, sworn in as president. One month later, Abraham Lincoln became the 16th president of the United States of America. A month after that, with shots fired...
February 05, 2011
Rabbi Cosgrove
Parashat T’rumah
There is a famous scene in Moliere’s play Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, shared between the main character, Monsieur Jourdain, and a professor of philosophy. Jourdain, though he grew up in a middle class background, has become wealthy owing to his father’s success as a merchant. Newly rich, Jourdain aspires to travel...
January 15, 2011
Rabbi Cosgrove
Beshallah — Shabbat Shirah
In her Pulitzer Prize winning novel Beloved, Toni Morrison describes how the protagonist, “Baby Suggs,” would, on occasion, take her company of slaves to an open area some distance away from the white-knuckle grip of their slave masters. “Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed,”...
December 04, 2010
Rabbi Cosgrove
Shabbat Hanukkah, Parashat Mi-ketz
In 1903, Chaim Nahman Bialik (1873-1934), the poet laureate of Modern Hebrew, was sent by the Jewish Historical Commission in Odessa to interview survivors of the Kishinev Pogrom. With dozens of Jews murdered, hundreds wounded, and countless Jewish homes looted and destroyed in anti-semitic riots, Bialik was...
November 27, 2010
Rabbi Cosgrove
Va-yeishev
If there is one song that embodies the festival of Thanksgiving, it is Lydia Maria Child’s “Over the River and Through the Wood.” “Over the river, and through the wood, to Grandfather’s (or Grandmother’s) house we go, [Journeying through] the white and drifted snow…Hurrah for Thanksgiving Day...
November 14, 2010
Rabbi Cosgrove
Va-yetzei 2010
If you read chapter one of Genesis carefully, or for that matter, any of the chapters that follow, then you can not help but realize that the Divine deed of significance is not so much the act of creation, as the act of separation. In the beginning, the universe was unformed and void. From it, God separated the heavens from the...
October 30, 2010
Rabbi Cosgrove
Hayei Sarah
My teacher in rabbinical school, Rabbi Eddie Feinstein of Temple Valley Beth Sholom in Los Angeles, taught me the most important lesson I ever learned about giving a sermon. No matter what you say, no matter what the topic, every sermon should be able to be summarized in a single sentence. Dress it up all you want, doll up the message...
October 16, 2010
Rabbi Cosgrove
Lekh L’kha 5771
You may have heard of the passing last week of one of the titans of New York real estate and philanthropic life, Robert Tishman. As president and chief executive of one of the county’s largest builders of office buildings, Mr. Tishman fashioned not only the New York skyline, but also the skylines of Chicago, Los Angeles...
September 30, 2010
Rabbi Cosgrove
Shemini Atzeret, Yizkor, 5772
In the coming week, when we hear the opening chapters of the book of Genesis, you should know that the most significant part of the story is not what happened, but what did not happen. We know the story well, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, invited to enjoy all the delights of the Garden – with one and only...
September 25, 2010
Rabbi Cosgrove
Shabbat Hol Ha-moed Sukkot 5771
This evening marks the 200th Yahrzeit of Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav – the man whom Martin Buber called the last Jewish Mystic. Great-grandson to the saintly founder of Hasidism, the Baal Shem Tov, Rebbe Nachman communicated his mystical wisdom to his disciples by means of symbolic tales. You may recall that...
September 18, 2010
Rabbi Cosgrove
Who is the most tragic figure of the entire Hebrew Bible? My teacher at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Professor Yochanan Muffs, would start each semester with this question, and since his passing last December, I can still imagine him waiting for a response. First as his student and then as his teaching assistant, every year I would listen to...
September 09, 2010
Rabbi Cosgrove
Rosh Hashanah 5771 / 2010
A century ago, Israel Zangwill’s play The Melting Pot was the talk of the town. The play was a contemporary adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The Jewish protagonist, David, immigrates to America from Russia in the wake of the Kishinev Pogroms. He falls in love with a fellow Russian, Vera, who is...
September 08, 2010
Rabbi Cosgrove
Some of you may recall Oscar Wilde’s classic The Picture of Dorian Gray from your high school reading list. Set in Victorian England, the story begins with young Dorian, a cultured, beautiful and vain man sitting for a portrait. At first enamored with his portrait, he soon comes to hate it, realizing that as he ages the picture of his youth...
June 11, 2010
Rabbi Cosgrove
Korah 5770
Coach John Wooden passed away in Los Angeles last Friday night, June 4, at the age of 99. Having grown up in the backyard of UCLA, I lived very much in the shadow of this towering college basketball coach affectionately called the “Wizard of Westwood.” His ten NCAA Championships at UCLA in a 12-year period stand as an...
May 28, 2010
Rabbi Cosgrove
Beha’alotkha 5770
Vay’hi binsoa ha-aron, va-yomer Moshe, When the Ark was carried forward, Moses would declare: “Kuma Adonai, v’yafutzu oyvekha, v’yanusu m’sanekha mi-panekha, Arise Lord, may your enemies be scattered, may your foes be put to flight.” These words, found in our parasha, Beha’alotkha,...
May 19, 2010
Rabbi Cosgrove
Shavuot 5770, Second Day
I want to tell you a story about something wonderful that happened to me this past week, very possibly the nicest thing that has happened to me in a long time. It’s a true story, a story-inside-a-story that will require a bit of patience on your part, but I promise it will be well worth it. It will hopefully inspire...
May 14, 2010
Rabbi Cosgrove
B’midbar 5770
If every single Jewish studies professor, from every campus across North America, were to get on an airplane that took off, flew away, and never came back again, would Jewish life change at all? Our synagogues, our Hebrew Schools, our Jewish summer camps, our UJA’s, our relationship with Israel – if there were no...
May 07, 2010
Rabbi Cosgrove
B’har/B’hukkotai 5770
Kol ha-olam kulo gesher tzar m’od v’ha-ikkar lo l’fahed klal. “The whole world is a very narrow bridge, and the essential thing is not to fear at all.”
These words, adapted from the writings of the great Hassidic master Rabbi Nahman of Bratzlav, are as enigmatic as they are famous....
April 30, 2010
Rabbi Cosgrove
Emor 5770
It may come to you as a surprise to hear that this past week you missed a Jewish holiday. Not just any festival, not some newfangled new age observance begun in the past few years or even centuries, but as Judaism goes, as ancient as ancient gets – all the way back to the time of Moses and the Torah. Last Wednesday, April 28th,...
April 23, 2010
Rabbi Cosgrove
Aharei Mot/Kedoshim 5770
Tomorrow afternoon, t-ball, soccer practice, and other parenting responsibilities permitting, I hope to stop by a one-day conference being hosted at Central Synagogue. I encourage you to attend. If you’re interested, speak to Cantor Elana Rozenfeld, who will be going with a group of our congregants. The conference is...
April 05, 2010
Rabbi Cosgrove
Passover 5770, Eighth Day
In every generation, at every Passover seder, we return to the iconic passage of the four children. Four children: wise, wicked, simple, and the one who does not know how to ask. In every reading, we know that these children represent far more than first appears, and have been interpreted differently throughout the ages....
March 29, 2010
Rabbi Cosgrove
Passover 5770, First Day
Style… ain’t nothing but keeping the same idea from beginning to end.” So said the great Pulitzer Prize-winning Pittsburgh playwright August Wilson. It is within our capacity to see and sustain a thought, from its origins into unseen future horizons; that is the measure of who we are. If this is the...
March 21, 2010
Rabbi Cosgrove
Sunday, March 21, 2010
If it were the case that Rabbi Milton Steinberg, z’’l, had only led this congregation from 1933 until his untimely death in 1950, building it from a sleepy Depression-era congregation to a beacon of intellectual, social, and religious activity in American life – that would have been enough. We would, as...
March 19, 2010
Rabbi Cosgrove
Va-yikra 5770
It is my distinct honor and privilege to offer a sermon in memory of Rabbi Milton Steinberg on the occasion of his 60th Yahrzeit. On behalf of the entire congregation, I want to welcome Rabbi Steinberg’s sons, Dr. David Steinberg and Dr. Jonathan Steinberg, and their family and friends who have gathered from near and far. We...
March 13, 2010
Rabbi Cosgrove
Va-yak•hel/P’kudei 5770
Over the past few months, there has been much ado in the press about something called the DSM-V. DSM, short for “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” is also known as “The Psychiatrist’s Bible.” Every decade or so (we are now on the DSM-V), the American Psychiatric...
February 20, 2010
Rabbi Cosgrove
T’rumah 5770
When our community gathers next Saturday night for the festival of Purim and the reading of the Scroll of Esther, many of us may feel that we are being offered two objectionable depictions of femininity. The first of the two problematic options appears in the very first chapter: Vashti, queen to the Persian King Achashverosh,...
February 06, 2010
Rabbi Cosgrove
Right beneath your nose, but just above your upper lip, sits something called the
philtrum. The origins and purpose of that small indentation are, for most of us, a
mystery. And while I hope none of us spend much time thinking about our philtrums (or, to be more precise: philtra), you may be interested to learn the rabbinic etiology of the...
February 06, 2010
Rabbi Cosgrove
Yitro 5770
Right beneath your nose, just above your upper lip, is something called the philtrum. The origins and purpose of that small indentation are, for most of us, a mystery. And while I hope none of us spend much time thinking about our philtrums (or to be more precise, philtra), you may be interested to learn the rabbinic etiology of the...
January 30, 2010
Rabbi Cosgrove
B’shallah 5770
President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s January 1941 State of the Union address bequeathed to us perhaps the most substantial ideological statement of the Second World War, if not of American rhetoric as a whole. He spoke of the “Four Freedoms,” the four essential ingredients of a good society and strong moral...
December 05, 2009
Rabbi Cosgrove
Va-yishlah 5770
What is the difference between a war of necessity and a war of choice? Judaism is not a pacifist tradition; it has always acknowledged that war, however tragic, is at times inevitable and necessary. “There is a time for loving and a time for hating, a time for war and a time for peace,” teaches Ecclesiastes. Peace is...
November 28, 2009
Rabbi Cosgrove
Va-yetzei 5770
Of the 52 Shabbatot of the Jewish year, Shabbat Thanksgiving may not rank at the very top of the hierarchy. Many people are away, and those of us who are here feel the lingering side effects of the last two days of food… and relatives. Certainly, when compared to Shabbat Shuvah, between Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah, or...
November 21, 2009
Rabbi Cosgrove
Toldot 5770
I would hope that when asked for help by a brother in need, each of us in this room would respond better than our patriarch Jacob did. The scene is one we know well: Esau comes home, famished from a hunt. He is faint and believes himself to be near death; he begs his brother for a bowl of lentil soup. Unconscionably, Jacob responds by...
October 23, 2009
Rabbi Cosgrove
Noah 5770
Dating has become a bit more complex since the days of Noah’s Ark. Two-by-two they entered, male and female: the birds, the cattle, the creeping things – two of each to stay alive. While none of us would wish the circumstances of our parasha to be repeated, in retrospect, the numbers certainly took the guesswork out of...
October 02, 2009
Rabbi Cosgrove
Sukkot 5770
Embedded deep within the foundation of Judaism exists a tension – an anxiety wrought by an unresolved question that has been with us since our very beginning. Is our faith, our Judaism, universal or particular in its orientation? To put it another way, is our greatest concern as Jews the condition of our collective and shared...
September 27, 2009
Rabbi Cosgrove
Yom Kippur 5770
Sadie and Abe had been married for many years. Over the decades, they had built a life together, achieving great material success, living far more luxuriously than they ever imagined from their humble beginnings. One day Abe came home from work, crushed, his face downcast and ashen. He turned to his Sadie, his life partner:...
September 25, 2009
Rabbi Cosgrove
Shabbat Shuvah 5770
Sincere apologies, it would seem, are our nation’s fastest diminishing resource. A few weeks ago, many of you may have watched one of the oddest and perhaps most unsatisfying endings to a U.S. Open tennis match, as Serena Williams strenuously and rather inelegantly objected to the linesman’s call of a foot fault...
September 18, 2009
Rabbi Cosgrove
Rosh Hashanah 5770
In his collection of stories on the High Holy Days, Sippurei Yom Hakippurim, Shai Agnon, the towering figure of modern Hebrew literature, makes repeated use of the symbol of the tallit. For Agnon it comes to represent much more than a mere piece of cloth. In one of the stories, Pi Shnayim, “Twice Over,” the...
September 17, 2009
Rabbi Cosgrove
Erev Rosh Hashanah 5770
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sholom Aleichem. Russian-born, settling in America in 1914, Aleichem has been called the “natural genius of Yiddish Literature.” (Irving Howe, A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, p. 74) If you have ever read a Sholom Aleichem story, then you know that the appeal...