Rabbi Steven Wernick

04/08/2026

I nearly wept last night.

Eight thousand of us — secular to religious, from all over the world — packed the TD Coliseum in Hamilton for the opening of the JCC Maccabi Games. And then Yuval Raphael sang.

You may know her story. On October 7 she survived the Nova festival massacre by hiding for eight hours beneath the bodies of the dead. Then she chose to sing — winning Israel's "Rising Star," carrying "New Day Will Rise" to Eurovision, standing tall as a hostile crowd booed.

Last night she led all 8,000 of us in Od Yavo Shalom — "peace will yet come." A woman with every reason to be finished with that word reminded us that we already know how to sing. That is who we are.

I wrote about what that moment revealed — about our resilience, our audacity, and our hope. You can find it on my The Times of Israel
Blog. Canadian law does not allow me to link it. Go to Blogs, search me.

24/07/2026

Last week we sat on the floor and read the Book of Eicha, our poem of destruction. This week I want to tell you what a 16th-century kabbalist did with it.

He took its darkest chapter — a poet in the rubble of Jerusalem — and drew from it the first words we say every morning: great is Your faithfulness. A mourning text became a morning prayer.

I've been sitting with the new Canadian Jewish Barometer, and its hardest number: nearly four in ten of us have begun to fear a Holocaust could happen here. I don't think that fear is hysterical. But I don't think memory alone is an answer either.

What I found instead — in Eicha, in Rabbi Akiva, and on the streets of Jerusalem two days before Tisha B'Av — is in my new blog for the Times of Israel.

Link in bio.

16/07/2026

Two families remember the same hills in Gush Etzion very differently.

Khaled's family was displaced in 1948, rebuilt, and was displaced again in 1967. In those same hills, a Jewish community was massacred on the eve of Israel's independence in 1948 — and its survivors' children returned in 1967 to rebuild it.

Both histories are true. Neither cancels the other.

This week, on a Hartman trip through Gush Etzion, I met Khaled himself — and heard how his family's grief led, eventually, to an impossible yes. I also sat with young Israeli women in Tekoa whose fear of their Palestinian neighbors is entirely earned. And I met young religious Zionists, Smol Emuni, trying to hold both truths at once.

This Shabbat Chazon, I don't have a resolution. I have a few certainties I can't hold onto quite as tightly as I did before. New post — link in bio.

10/07/2026

This Shabbat, as we read Matot-Masei, I'm thinking about the 18 consecutive wilderness stops that appear nowhere else in the Torah. Eighteen encampments. Thirty-eight years of a generation's life. No story recorded. Just names.

Tahat — Beneath. Mitkah — Sweetness. Haradah — Trembling.

The Torah records the stops. It doesn't explain them. Maybe it doesn't have to.

Shabbat Shalom. May your unnamed stops find their names this week. 🕯️

Link in Bio.

08/07/2026

June 29 I turned 59. My spirit hasn't gotten the memo. My body has read every page.

This week's Torah portion, Matot-Masei, contains 42 stops the Israelites made in the wilderness. Nearly half of them appear nowhere else in the entire Bible — no story attached, no miracle, no explanation. Just a name.

Rebbe Nachman says those unnamed stops are where the soul does its deepest work. Crisis produces story. Endurance produces character. And endurance rarely gets a name.

Last summer I took my wife to Winnipeg and Minneapolis. The house I grew up in. The cemetery. Shaarey Zedek on my 45th Bar Mitzvah anniversary, without planning it.

This week at the Shalom Hartman Institute, our cohort mapped our faith journeys. The parashah had already asked the question.

New piece in the Times of Israel — link in bio.

Shabbat Shalom.

02/07/2026

Well done!

Sorry, I just could not resist…

30/06/2026

Yesterday afternoon we stood at Kibbutz Ein HaShalosh in the Gaza Envelope.

In three days we mark 1,000 days since October 7. Yesterday, on that same ground — attacked, evacuated, returned — residents laid a cornerstone for new homes.

This week's Torah portion is Pinchas. After all the violence and grief, God doesn't say wait. God says: count your people, claim your inheritance, build — now.

That's not a political statement. That's three thousand years speaking.

Read more at my blog on The Times of Israel link in bio.

14/06/2026

It's been a week since 60k people filled Bathurst St, and I'm still sitting with it. Not the flags or the chants -- though those mattered. What I keep coming back to is a comment someone left in my post that day. Five words, with a question mark carried a sneer: "This is a community afraid?!" I've spent the week with that comment and the week's Torah reading. What I found surprised me.

More on my Times of Israel blog "We are not Grasshoppers." And my Shabbat sermon www.youtube.com//videos.

26/05/2026

At our Tikkun Layl Shavuot last week, Bruce Elman — retired law professor, dean, and Constitutional law expert — asked a question I'd never considered: Why does the Ninth Commandment use two different words for "false witness"?

In Exodus: sheker — a deliberate lie.
In Deuteronomy: shav — something more insidious. A misleading frame. A true fact deployed to deceive.

That distinction has never felt more urgent. Our new Times of Israel piece explores what the Torah knew about misinformation — and what Yossi Klein Halevi is saying we need to hear about the narrative war being waged against Israel and the Jewish people.

Go to my Times of Israel Blog to read the entire piece. Link in comments.

From the blog of Steven C. Wernick at The Times of Israel