Advertise on podcast: Deeper Look At The Parsha

Israel’s political landscape is shifting, and so is its relationship with America. To understand this moment, Rabbi Dunner turns to Abraham’s declaration, “I am a stranger and a resident,” to explore what Israel must learn from Chayei Sarah: gratitude without dependence, friendship without entitlement, and the confidence to take responsibility for its future as old assumptions begin to fall away.

Chayei Sarah begins with Sarah’s death, yet the Torah calls it “Sarah’s life.” To explain why, Rabbi Dunner explores Sarah’s character and prophetic vision, Avraham’s grief, Rivka’s kindness, and the return of Sarah’s miraculous tent. In this shiur, you'll discover a powerful idea: that a Jewish life continues wherever its values, light, faith, and goodness are carried forward across generations.

In Sodom, strangers met cruelty; at Abraham’s tent, they found generosity. Thousands of years later, when September 11 forced 38 planes to land in Gander, Newfoundland, townspeople faced the same moral choice. Rabbi Dunner tells how they welcomed nearly 7,000 strangers into their homes, showing that Abraham’s hospitality is not merely ancient history, but a sacred and enduring human trait.

Robert Williams risked Hubble telescope time by pointing it at an empty patch of sky. But what appeared to contain nothing revealed thousands of galaxies. Rabbi Dunner connects that discovery to Abraham’s encounter with the stars, and to a powerful Jewish idea: expert predictions matter, but they are never the final word on what a person, or a people, can become.

In 1982, astronaut James Irwin climbed Mount Ararat searching for Noah’s Ark and found something far less impressive: a pair of abandoned skis. Yet the ancient flood stories uncovered in Mesopotamia reveal a more important discovery. Rabbi Dunner compares them with the Torah’s account of Noach and asks what the real legacy of the Ark was meant to be for humanity after the waters receded.

Parshat Bereishit begins with creation, but its deepest questions are strikingly personal. God asks Adam, “Where are you?” and Cain, “Where is your brother?” Rabbi Dunner traces these questions through creation, responsibility, failure, repentance, loneliness, Shabbat, and the value of every human life, showing how the entire Torah can be understood as an answer to those two questions.

For twenty-six years, Brazil’s “Man of the Hole” lived alone in the Amazon, the last survivor of a destroyed people, while strangers quietly protected him from afar. His story makes Cain’s question — “Am I my brother’s keeper?” — painfully literal. Rabbi Dunner explores responsibility, isolation, lost worlds, and what it means to guard another human being, even without gratitude or recognition.

Ancient idol worship sometimes turned desecration itself into ritual: stones were thrown, and degradation became devotion. Watching the latest UN General Assembly, Rabbi Dunner sees an unsettling parallel. From Javier Milei’s blistering attack to António Guterres’s rhetoric and the walkout during Netanyahu’s speech, the institution’s sacred status seem increasingly at odds with how it is treated. Sukkot offers a radically different vision of nations gathering together.

Sukkot begins with a flimsy hut and ends with dancing around a Torah scroll. In between come the four species, Kohelet, Hoshana Rabba, Shemini Atzeret, and a series of rituals that seem oddly disconnected. Rabbi Dunner shows how they form one argument: life is temporary, joy is deliberate, belonging requires participation, and every apparent ending is really another fresh beginning.

Jonas Hanway became famous in eighteenth-century London for carrying an umbrella when respectable Englishmen considered them ridiculous. Sukkot asks us to do something almost opposite: leave our solid homes and sit beneath a deliberately incomplete roof. Rabbi Dunner explores security, vulnerability, happiness, and the crucial difference between protecting ourselves wisely and imagining that we are somehow invulnerable.

Can a Jew ever be too far gone? In 1917, more than four centuries after Portugal forced its Jews into hiding, Polish Jew Samuel Schwarz found a community still guarding fragments of Judaism in secret. From the anusim and Dona Gracia Nasi to Menashe ben Israel and modern genetics, Rabbi Dunner explores an astonishing truth at the heart of Shabbat Shuva: Jewish identity can be buried, but it refuses to disappear.

Barney Barnato rose from London’s East End to become one of the richest men in the British Empire, only to die at forty-six after going overboard in the Atlantic. His extraordinary life reads almost like all of the contrasts in Unetaneh Tokef. Rabbi Dunner explores uncertainty, reversal, despair, hope, and why Yom Kippur refuses to let any of us believe the story is over yet.

Yom Kippur can feel like a day to endure: fasting, confession, white garments, and hours in shul. But beneath the solemnity lies one of Judaism’s most radical promises — that people can truly change. From the shattered second tablets to Kol Nidrei, forgiveness, apology, and Neilah, Rabbi Dunner explores why the holiest day of the year is ultimately a day of joy.

The Rosh Hashana machzor has 100’s of pages and the davening is really long. You already know about the shofar, the apple, the honey, and about Unesaneh Tokef. But you don’t know everything. In this shiur, Rabbi Dunner helps you notice the messages behind what you know, because what Rosh Hashana really demands is that you get yourself off autopilot.

In 1544, a Flemish mapmaker sat in a castle dungeon on a charge of heresy. Twenty-five years later he published the map that still hangs in every classroom, and still makes Greenland look the size of Africa. Like him, we are all guilty of distorting proportion - but Rosh Hashana forces us to redraw our map.