Messages from January 2020

Rabbi O’s Weekly Parsha: Va’eira (Exodus 6:2-9:35) Starbucks and Pharaoh

Imagine if you were miraculously given superhuman power and had the ability to confront an evil monarch, someone who has persecuted, oppressed and murdered tens of thousands of people. How would you approach him? Would you address him in a respectful way or would speak in an insulting and degrading fashion? Whether it was Ivan […]

Rabbi O’s Weekly Parsha:Shemot (Exodus 1:1-6:1) Cookie Monster

If you want to know how power effects even our most mundane choices, you need go no further than the “Cookie Monster Study,” done by Dr. Dacher Keltner, professor of psychology at Berkeley. Here’s how he describes it. We bring three people to the lab, and we randomly assign one person to the role of leader. […]

Rabbi O’s Weekly Parsha: Vayigash (Genesis 44:18-47:27)5780-2020 Sweat

Ad Vingerhoets is a professor of psychology at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. The thing that makes him unique is that he is an expert on crying and has spent over twenty years “studying when and why we cry, and how the study of crying may help us obtain better insight into human nature.” According […]