Rabbi David Ingber’s Friday night sermon from Romemu last week is about doorways, and welcoming the stranger, and how we are all “immigrants” in this life, and what Jewish tradition asks of us as we relate to others. Here’s a taste:

“It’s an essential core piece of our human story. Boundaries, permeability, relationships. All of this is what it means to be human, and it’s part of the Jewish self-understanding, part of what we tell ourselves as Jews in our narrative.

Doors and doorways are fundamentally about liminality. About the in-between; about the spaces, whether physical, emotional, spiritual, intellectual, where we are in-between. We as a people have been known from time immemorial as those who cross over. We are the children of Abraham, the ivri. We know what it is to be boundary-crossers…

Every child who is born into this world is born an immigrant. Each and every human being comes into an unknown world whose culture will have to be learned. We begin life as immigrants, as boundary-crossers, as those who leave and who enter, who come and go through life’s doorways.”

The sermon is available both on Soundcloud and on YouTube:

On Soundcloud: People of the Door.

On YouTube:

(If you can’t see the embedded video, here’s a link directly to it at youtube.)

Deep thanks to Rabbi David Ingber for this deep Torah, both timeless and timely.

Shabbat shalom to all.