Mike Wirth sits down with Rabbi Danny Burkeman, Senior Rabbi at Temple Shir Tikva in Wayland, Massachusetts, and host of the award-winning podcast Two Minutes of Torah. Danny was raised in the British Reform movement, ordained in 2009, and has spent his rabbinical career making Judaism urgent and alive for the modern world.
This episode goes deep on a question this show keeps circling: what does it mean to build the future from the inside out? Danny and Mike find that thread running through science fiction. Doctor Who. Star Trek. And Andor, the Star Wars series that may be the most morally serious popular story of our moment. Together they trace the shared architecture between great sci-fi and Jewish teaching: the rebel who discovers what they stand for, the slow repair of the self, the cost of looking away.
That brings them to Mussar, the 19th-century Jewish movement of character ethics founded by Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, which asks practitioners to name their moral weaknesses, sit with them honestly, and do the slow work of reshaping them. Danny walks listeners through how to actually begin a Mussar practice: not as a grand gesture, but as a daily reckoning with one middah, one character trait, at a time.
The conversation moves through what it means to rehearse a better version of yourself before you become them, how stories we love shape the people we are choosing to become, and why Jewish tradition has always been in the business of prototyping futures.
This one is for Trekkies with siddurim, rabbis who rewatch Andor, and anyone who believes that self-repair is the most radical act of world and galaxy repair.