Category: Rabbi’s Dvrei Torah

These week’s double Torah portion, BeHar-Bechukotai, concludes the third book of this year’s Torah reading cycle – we finish Leviticus this week. Nevertheless, we continue with business-as-usual again as we immediately begin reading in the 4th book of the Torah, Numbers, next week.

Is there ever really a break? A true vacation? Not from the Torah, no: We famously finish reading the entire cycle of Torah on Simchat Torah and then right away open another scroll and start all over again at the Beginning! The message is that Torah is the exception, the one thing in human experience that – like God – touches our lives to the eternal and never-concluding, the ever-present now.  

But what about on a personal level?

Many of us are solidifying our summer plans right about now, or perhaps some of us are already in the operational phase of those plans. How ‘good’ were you at truly relaxing and vacationing when your kids were smaller? How about now? Is there anything in your daily routine that you cannot take a break from, or don’t want to?

F. Scott Fitzgerald observed that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

The Torah suggests a slightly different, though related, test.

Intelligence is important for this test, but it is not the only aspect. The Torah is decidedly egalitarian, designed to speak to all of us. This test is for all of us: the brainy or less so, rich or poor, all genders and sexualities, young or old, lucky or unlucky, all political persuasions…

“Excuse me? Are you talking to me?….I’m looking around but I don’t see anyone else here?! Oh my God, you ARE talking to me!”

This seems to be the feeling that many people of a certain age experienced three years ago at this season when the Coronavirus pandemic started. As the threat to older people emerged, many were surprised to discover that it was they themselves who were being addressed as the aged population who were particularly at risk. Many humorous though poignant memes circled social media capturing the sense of shock that accompanied being called out by that age; the sense of disbelief and undeniability at the number of years passed circling the sun, the abrupt dissolution of some cognitive dissonance about having qualified – even if only ‘technically’ – as a “senior”, and by the wonder of it…

This week’s Torah portion, Shemini, offers some perspective.

The Jewish People are in a time of fearful crisis. Huge demonstrations are boiling in the streets of Israel, and counter protests are being planned. Political differences are exploiting and magnifying tensions that are inherent to the Jewish people along religious, cultural, and ethnic lines, world-views, and the vision of what – and who – Israel is and must become. The quaking along the fault-lines of Israeli society are of unprecedented magnitude, shaking up the balance between the judicial, legislative, and executive branches of democracy and rattling the ‘rules of the game’ that have governed Israel until now. Israel’s divisions and vulnerabilities are on display to our enemies, and the fractures are weakening our nation and threaten to pull the greatest enterprise of the Jewish People for the last 2,000 years apart at the seams, God forbid.

It feels like spring outside…well, almost.

The sunset is suddenly an hour later since we changed the clocks.

Basketball’s ‘March Madness’ is more exciting than ever.

We begin a new book of the Torah this week, the third of five, with parashat Vayikra.

Passover is nearly here.

This is a time for renewal, hope, and embracing life. Let’s underscore the value and feeling of freedom we celebrate at Passover!

Here is an all-new ‘Top Ten’ list of ways to make this Passover 2023 meaningful, fun, and redemptive!

Shalom Chaverim!

It was this week 3 years ago when the way we live our lives pivoted so dramatically. The COVID lockdown started and we found ourselves at home. The Torah portion that week is this same as it is again this week, and it remains both ironic and so fittingly apt in what it has to teach us about the experience of the last three years.

The dual Torah portion is called Vaykhel-Pikudei, named for Moses’ assembling -congregating – all the people together. The first thing he announces after they assemble as a community is that on the 7th day Sabbath everyone needs to take a day off from work and stay at home…if for no other reason than to save lives.

Three years on, we can easily recall the mindset of very consciously avoiding any assembly, keeping distance from one another in order to save our lives and others’ lives in our community. We experienced a kind of extended and universal Bible-literal Sabbath with almost everyone around the world staying home.

Many of us still have that ‘avoid-the-crowds’ mindset to some degree, whether intentionally or unintentionally.

When I was young and naïve—last week in fact—I recalled how, when I was even younger and more naïve, one of the things that chiefly occupied my time was anger. I was either actually being angry at something or other, or I was consumed with trying to control or dissolve my anger once unloosed.

Years and years ago, I succeeded in making some steady progress toward uprooting anger from my soul, from my behavior, from my psyche…but I hold no illusion: I never actually snuffed it out completely from my being, and that little glowing wick of anger occasionally bursts into a flame.

And so I was concerned on the occasion, last week, that reminded me of my old self, and of my theory back then that anger is a behavior that is learned—and as such can be unlearned. The occasion was seeing my own child lose their temper. I worried: Despite my efforts to the contrary, did this child learn that anger from me? Am I the one who taught – infected – this child with “anger”?

It is not a coincidence that International Women’s Day falls next Wednesday (March 8), immediately after “The Fast of Esther” on Monday, and Purim on Tuesday:

There is much to celebrate about the role and achievements of women in Jewish history and world history…and still a great need to highlight these specifically in order to continue the advance of women for full and equal participation in global development and for the freedom of women to choose and to create their own individual destinies.

[The Jewish socialist Theresa Malkiel’s launching of a National Women’s Day in 1909 catalyzed the idea for establishing International Women’s Day in 1911.]

The Purim story in particular offers us a helpful way to consider issues of agency and independence, authority and autonomy, that many women experience today in our society.

We can ask: Is Esther a feminist hero for saving the Jewish people with her bravery to confront the king without an invitation to do so?

And with her cleverness that took down Haman?

And her wisdom for establishing the parameters of an entirely new Jewish holiday – Purim – which we still celebrate to this day?

The Voyager I spacecraft sent a photo back to earth in 1990 from more than 4 billion miles away. In it, the earth appears as a point of light, a crescent 0.12 pixels in size. It is barely noticeable.

The noted astronomer and host of the old “Cosmos” television series, Carl Sagan, wrote the following about that “pale blue dot” in the photo:

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives…every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

From such a perspective, it is easy to feel insignificant, meaningless. Our Torah portion this week, Teruma, serves as a kind of protest against despairing of the transiency and minuteness of life.

Many of us would find this week’s Torah portion kind of…tedious. It contains over 50 laws and ordinances, and it reads sometimes as a long list of rules. Each of these ordinances requires focus to understand – and deep reflection to grasp – its deeper meaning and profound ramifications for your personal life, for human society generally, and for the building of a functional and moral universe. 

You might be inclined to skim through all these rules, or skip parashat Mishpatim entirely. But just imagine: What if the world, what if our nation, what if our community did not have laws and standards at all? Imagine living in the ‘wild west’ or in total anarchy. The law of the jungle would soon prevail. For much of world history, it was the local bully, the rich and well-connected, the area warlord, and/or the nearby dictator who seized power and wielded it for their own gain and ruthless interest. Sadly, it still happens in our world today.