Advertise on podcast: Deeper Look At The Parsha

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.

In 1925, master conman Victor Lustig managed to “sell” the Eiffel Tower to a respectable Paris scrap dealer. The scam was outrageous, but its success exposed something deeply human: we are often easiest to fool when we desperately want a story to be true. Rabbi Dunner finds an unsettling echo of this exact weakness in Parshat Nitzavim.

Why can a person have everything and still feel empty? Parshat Ki Tavo offers a startling answer: fulfillment depends not on what we possess, but on how we receive it. From John Stuart Mill to Bikkurim, Holocaust survivors, and modern psychology, Rabbi Dunner explores how gratitude transforms abundance into gladness — and why that may be the essential spiritual work of Elul.

In 1897, New York’s wealthiest families spent a fortune dressing as European royalty at the spectacular Bradley-Martin Ball. Parshat Ki Tavo opens with another elaborate ceremony of success—but with a very different script. Rabbi Dunner explores ancestry, ambition, memory, and the strange temptation to improve the past once the present has turned out rather well.

Patti Lyle Collins could decipher addresses everyone else considered hopeless, rescuing thousands of letters from Washington’s Dead Letter Office. Her remarkable gift offers a striking lens on Parshat Ki Teitzei’s command not to ignore what others have lost. The Torah asks more than helpfulness: it asks us to resist indifference, and never to look away from those in need.

Joshua Norton lost his fortune, declared himself Emperor of the United States, and somehow became one of San Francisco’s most beloved characters. His strange story offers a surprisingly sharp lens on Parshat Shoftim’s vision of royal leadership: titles may confer authority, but they never make one human being inherently greater than another.

The railway revolution transformed Britain, but it also exposed an unexpected problem: every town kept its own time. What followed offers a striking lesson for Parshat Re’eh. Diversity is a blessing, but only when it rests on a common foundation. Without a shared center, even strength, talent and sincerity can leave people fragmented, confused, and unable to move together.

We imagine that seeing is automatic, but Parshat Re’eh insists otherwise. From Harvard’s invisible gorilla to the Torah’s blessing and curse, this shiur explores how easily we miss what matters most. True vision means recognizing where a road leads, seeing the people beside us, and discovering that blessing begins when we learn to look at life through Torah-trained eyes each and every day.