Photo Credit: flickr.com/photos/maltin75/6278446183 “Observe God’s laws and commandments, which I enjoin upon you this day, that it may go well with you and your children after you, and that you may long remain in the land that the LORD your God is assigning to you...
Photo: COSV from Wikimedia Commons. Women Gathering Wood, South Sudan My friend Sylvia (who says I’m her favorite female rabbi) is almost 98–may she live and be well–and is often troubled by the harsher judgments and more problematic passages in the Torah. And rightly...
Photo credit: publicdomainpibtures.net Shabbat for the Fourth of July Two hundred and 46 years ago, the Continental Congress approved the final wording of the Declaration of Independence, and in addition to stating a litany of grievances against tyrannical British...
The yearly Torah-reading cycle is a beautiful thing. Every week, when I look at the parashah for the upcoming Shabbat, I see something I hadn’t noticed before. I also the same words year-after-year, but find different understandings of them, depending on what’s going...
This Shabbat we read parashat Behar, “on the mountain,” and from that mountain–Sinai–God gave Moses the commandments regarding Shmita and Yovel, the sabbatical and jubilee years, where the land was to lie fallow, not being planted or harvested. But wait, weren’t all...
What does it mean to be kadosh, “holy,” or “sanctified”? I always used to think it meant “elevated,” or somehow, “better than” something or someone else. Dictionary.com would certainly have you believe that, but the Hebrew word, kadosh, means “to be set apart.” A...
Recent Comments