IKAR Podcasts

It’s Time to Write a New Beginning - Rabbi Sharon Brous

The Cornell 57 has reawakened critical conversations around violence, complicity, and the bystander effect. It also reveals the failure of the dominant stories we tell around gender, subjugation, dehumanization. This is an urgent reminder that another world is possible.

The Tree of Sweet and Bitter / Parashat Bereishit - Rabbi David Kasher

Source sheet: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JAg6k6KfzAw-1PN1l6Vk7cWxiL13leRM/view?usp=sharing This is a recording of the Weekly Parashah - Rabbi David Kasher's Torah study class co-sponsored by Hadar and IKAR. Please note that the first few minutes of this week's class were not recorded due to a technical issue. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Yizkor Drash - Rabbi Deborah Silver | Shmini Atzeret 5787

Sukkot Drash - Rabbi Hannah Jensen

Rabbi Hannah Jensen's teaching on Sukkot before the Torah reading on Shabbat 9.26.2026

It's Getting Hot in Here - Rabbinic Intern Jacob Schatz | Sukkot

The Talmud's story of a sweltering sukkah illuminates our urgent need for authentically Jewish answers and action as we face the mounting climate crisis.

IsraAID’s Yotam Polizer and Rabbi Sharon Brous in Conversation in the Sukkah

Yotam Polizer is the Global CEO of IsraAID, Israel’s leading humanitarian NGO. Yotam oversees IsraAID’s global operations, strategy and partnerships across 15 countries. He became IsraAID’s co-CEO in 2017 and Global CEO in 2019. Polizer is the 2023 Charles Bronfman award laureate. He has 15 years’ experience in education, humanitarian aid, and international development.

Writing Yourself into the Book of Life - Rabbi Dvora Weisberg

One of the central prayers of the High Holy Day liturgy reminds us of the uncertainty we face in the year ahead. But the prayer also offers us ways to maintain equilibrium in the midst of uncertainty. This in turn allows us to be the authors of our own Book of Life.

How a Bereaved Father Found Solace By Encountering the Humanity of the Person Who Killed His Children

Rabbi Sharon Brous and Colin Campbell in conversation: Choosing Love: How a Bereaved Father Found Solace By Encountering the Humanity of the Person Who Killed His Children. Colin Campbell is a writer and director for theater and film. He is the author of Finding the Words: Working Through Profound Loss with Hope and Purpose. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Seraglio, a short film he wrote and directed with his lovely and talented wife, Gail Lerner. He has taught Theater and/or Filmmaking at Chapman University, Loyola Marymount University, Cal Poly Pomona University, and to incarcerated youth through The Unusual Suspects. His one person show titled, Grief: A One Man ShitShow, premiered at the Hollywood Fringe Festival where it won a Best of Broadwater Award. He lives in Los Angeles and sometimes Joshua Tree.

When What We Love Falls - Rabbi Morris Panitz | Yom Kippur

What does it mean to remain connected to something we love when it disappoints us? How do we hold love, criticism, belonging, and moral involvement in the same hands?

The Torah I Learned From the Pope, and From My Father - Rabbi Sharon Brous | Kol Nidre

From estrangement to engagement: How small, steadfast acts of love will be the bridge to the healing we need.

To Live and Love Well Not in Spite of Death, But Because of It - Rabbi Sharon Brous & Dr. BJ Miller | Rosh Hashanah II

Palliative care specialist BJ Miller helps patients and families face illness and death realistically, comfortably, and on their own terms. Miller is cultivating a model for palliative care organizations around the world, and emphasizing healthcare’s quixotic relationship to the inevitability of death. He is a hospice and palliative medicine physician and sees patients and families via telehealth at Mettle Health, a company he co-founded with the aim to provide personalized, holistic consultations for any patient or caregiver who needs help navigating the many practical, emotional and communication issues that come with serious or chronic illness, end of life and disability. Miller’s passion for palliative care stems from personal experience -- a shock sustained while a Princeton undergraduate cost him three limbs and nearly killed him. But his experiences form the foundation of a hard-won empathy for patients who are running out of time. Let’s Begin at the End: Learning to Live and Love Well Not in Spite of Death, But Because of It. A conversation between Rabbi Sharon Brous and Dr. BJ Miller on Rosh Hashanah II.

Avinu Malkeinu | Rosh Hashanah II

"We've tried everything, and we nonetheless fear that it just wasn't enough. Now we are here standing before you with no more plays in the playbook. There's nothing more we can do, and we just hope that you can be satisfied with what we were able to fix and forgive us for the rest. Avinu Malkeinu, show us mercy, answer us, not because we're beyond saving, but because we're trying." Intro provided by rabbinic intern Jacob Schatz.

Zealots Are Driving Us to the Cliff’s Edge - Rabbi Sharon Brous | Rosh Hashanah I

Extremism becomes palatable only in the absence of robust moral alternatives. That’s where we come in.

This Is Your Life - Rabbi Hannah Jensen | Erev Rosh Hashanah Sermon

Don't let your life pass you by. It may be that your life is not what you imagined. Grieve what you need to grieve about where you are. And then invest in the life you have and find the beauty in it.

Taller On The Inside - Rabbi Deborah Silver

The High Holyday liturgy is full of images of emptiness and abasement, as if to tell us, “You got nothing.” How does this week’s parashah, always read just before the High Holydays, put itself into conversation with Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur?

Read it both ways  - Rabbi Candice Levy

Ki Tavo offers a theology of reward and punishment, of cause and effect, but lived experience teaches us that the world does not work so neatly. What becomes possible when we read the parashah forwards and backwards, not only as protest against injustice, but also as a guide to rebuilding a shattered world?

Rabbi Sharon Brous and Daniela Gerson discuss "The Wanderers"

Part genealogical detective story, part gripping history, part contemporary reporting on war-torn territories, The Wanderers - A Story of Exile, Survival, and Unexpected Love in the Shadow of World War II, chronicles Daniela’s journey to unearth this past and reveal its echoes in still-contested lands from Ukraine to Israel.

IKAR High Holy Days Bootcamp 5787

Grab a glass of grape juice or wine and a comfy chair, and join your rabbis for a launch of the season. We’ll cover many of the High Holy Day basics (What can I expect if I’m coming for the first time? Wait, another Amidah? And which service do I wear white to?), along with some of the most perplexing questions of the season (Remind me why we’re doing all this? Why does September feel like a marathon? Is teshuvah really possible?). We’ll do our best to connect, elucidate, and elaborate in 90 minutes or less.

The Verse That Made Me Want to Throw Out the Whole Book - Rabbi Myra Meskin

What do we do when Torah contains laws that violate our deepest moral commitments? A troubling passage from Parashat Ki Teitzei invites us to wrestle with difficult texts-and to see interpretation not as an escape from tradition, but as our obligation within it.

On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear - Ami Fields-Meyer & Rabbi Sharon Brous in conversation

Ami Fields-Meyer discusses his New York Times best seller "On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear" with Rabbi Sharon Brous. Co-Sponsored by J Street and New Israel Fund.