Teaching Our Jacobs and Esaus
Nov 9, 2002 By Steven Brown | Commentary | Toledot
Recounting the gestation, birth and maturation of the Bible’s most famous twins, Esau and Jacob, reminds me of a wonderful PBS film entitled, “How Difficult Can It Be? The F.A.T. City Workshop.” F.A.T. stands for Frustration, Anxiety, Tension. Through a series of simulations and exercises, Richard D. Lavoie, a gifted special education teacher, turns a group of highly accomplished adults into learning disabled students in a matter of minutes. He reminds us that children with learning differences or disabilities experience them not only in school, but twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, leading to daily frustration, anxiety and tension in their everyday lives. During a poignant moment in the film, Lavoie comments that fairness is not treating everyone the same, it’s giving everyone what she or he needs.
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Words Create Worlds
Nov 9, 2002 By Lauren Eichler Berkun | Commentary | Toledot
This week’s Torah portion gives us a powerful, albeit troubling, reminder of the power of words. Jacob tricks his blind father Isaac into giving him the blessing reserved for the first-born son. Once the deception is unveiled, and Esau stands before Isaac with great expectation, the Torah paints a poignant picture of the devastating consequences of Isaac’s words.
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Repeating the Past
Nov 2, 2002 By Matthew Berkowitz | Commentary | Hayyei Sarah
Ironically death pervades Parashat Hayyei Sarah, the parashah that is literally translated as “the lives of Sarah.” The Torah reading opens with the death of Sarah and closes with the death of Abraham. In between, we are privy to the negotiations between Abraham and Ephron over the Cave of Makhpelah (which would become the burial site for our ancestors) and the search for Isaac’s mate. Life is bracketed by death. Sadly, it is a fitting parashah given the circumstances confronting our brothers and sisters in Israel today.
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The Torah’s First Love
Nov 2, 2002 By Lewis Warshauer | Commentary | Hayyei Sarah
A newspaper reader knows from the headline what the topic of the article will be. Not so with the Torah. The title of each parashah is its first significant word; whether that word tells what will follow is somewhat up to chance. In Parashat No·ah, the title does tells us who will be the central focus of the narrative. In this week’s parashah, the title Hayyei Sarah seems to be irrelevant, misleading and yet, perhaps, fraught with meaning.
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Abraham’s Love
Oct 26, 2002 By Melissa Crespy | Commentary | Vayera
vi, our three and a half-year-old son, went to work with his Abba the other day. Though he spent a good deal of the day in the company’s child care center, he and his dad traveled on the subway together (watching the “local” and “express” trains), had lunch together, and then came home together. And these “father and son” experiences have become more and more frequent in the last year – Abba giving Avi a bath, Abba taking Avi to minyan with him, and of course, the nightly singing of “Abba Shema” before Avi goes to sleep. These experiences are endearing to me because I watch the flowering of the special relationship between our son and his father.
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The Test of Abraham
Oct 22, 2002 By Joshua Heller | Commentary | Vayera
Ever since I was a child, I’ve struggled with a fundamental question about Abraham’s personality, a question which is posed by this week’s parashah, Va-Yera. When God comes to Abraham to inform him that the city of Sodom is to be destroyed for its wickedness, Abraham responds aggressively by shaming God into agreeing to spare the city if fifty righteous can be found within it, saying, “Far be it from You! Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?” (Genesis 18:25). Then, with a bargaining style that would be the envy of any used-car buyer, teenager or trial lawyer, he lowers the number to forty-five, to thirty, to twenty, to ten.
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The Lonely and Crowded Path of Monotheism
Oct 19, 2002 By Lewis Warshauer | Commentary | Lekh Lekha
Most Jews have the feeling that Jews are different, to a greater or lesser extent, from the other peoples of the world. Jews have long had a sense of separation from the rest of the world, yet togetherness with each other. Most Jews will say, in response to the question of who was the first Jew, that it was Abraham. It then follows that in order to get a better sense of what makes Jews different from other people which is another way of asking what Jewish identity consists of that one needs to look at Abraham, and particularly as his career begins in this week’s parashah.
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Where Is God’s Awesomeness?
Oct 19, 2002 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Lekh Lekha
The Tanakh is the quarry from which the siddur was constructed. Long passages and individual phrases were lifted to create the verbal prayer that became the hallmark of the synagogue. Best known are the three paragraphs of the Shema taken from the books of Deuteronomy and Numbers and the many psalms from the Psalter. This week’s parashah contributed only a single word to this edifice, but one of unique centrality and resonance.
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The Tower of Babel
Oct 12, 2002 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Noah
The last mythological fragment we have in the Torah before we come to the figure of Abraham is the Tower of Babel. With this episode the Torah turns its attention from the universal to the particular, from the history of humanity to the descendants of Shem, No·ah’s firstborn son. As preserved, the story is but nine verses — brief, insignificant and unedifying, not much more than a dismissive satire on Babylon. At best, we try to connect this fragment to the mystery of human language. If we are all progeny of No·ah, how did we come to speak so many different languages?
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Sexual Immorality
Oct 12, 2002 By Lauren Eichler Berkun | Commentary | Noah
The Flood story in Parashat Noah is a frightening account of divine punishment.
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The Conversion Controversy
Oct 5, 2002 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Bereishit
Conversion is back in the news. During the High-Holy-Day period just ended, a Conservative rabbinic court in Eastern Europe completed the conversion process of eighteen Czech and nineteen Polish converts to Judaism. Some 80 per cent had Jewish roots. All studied formally for at least a full year (many more) and were obliged to be active in their respective Jewish communities. Prior to conversion, the men underwent either a full or symbolic ritual circumcision (if already circumcised), while both men and women went through ritual immersion. Another half-dozen in Prague are on their way to completing the conversion process.
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On New Beginnings
Oct 5, 2002 By Matthew Berkowitz | Commentary | Bereishit
As a teacher for JTS Kollot: Voices of Learning, I hear many voices of Torah that open my eyes to creative ways of reading the texts of our sacred tradition.
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Sight and Knowledge
Oct 5, 2002 By Matthew Berkowitz | Commentary | Bereishit
As a teacher for JTS Kollot: Voices of Learning, I hear many voices of Torah that open my eyes to creative ways of reading the texts of our sacred tradition.
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Remembering Moses
Sep 27, 2002 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Vezot Haberakhah | Shemini Atzeret | Simhat Torah
My father died twenty years ago. The day of his yahrzeit has never been hard for me to remember. It follows by one day the day affixed by the Talmud for the death of Moses (BT Kiddushin 38a). Moses died on the seventh of Adar, the last month of the Jewish calendar, and my father on the eighth. Thus the Hebrew date of my father’s passing is forever anchored in my memory by its proximity to the traditional date for the demise of Moses. Reciprocally, that convergence has heightened for me the yahrzeit of Moses, which is barely noted in most Jewish calendars.
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Ritual in Our Lives
Sep 20, 2002 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Sukkot
When I was a youngster growing up in small-town America in the 1940s, the only sukkah in town stood behind the synagogue. It did service for the entire congregation. Even my father, the rabbi of our Conservative synagogue and devoutly observant, never seemed to entertain the idea of putting up a sukkah in our backyard. In those days, people had less time for domestic rituals and shied away from any public display of their Jewishness. The synagogue in Pottstown, a large, handsome, basilican structure on the main street, had become the last arena of individual and collective Jewish expression.
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9/11 in Perspective
Sep 16, 2002 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Yom Kippur
Last year’s assault on America struck less than a week before Rosh Hashanah. With the embers still burning and the air laden with smoke and the taste of ashes in our mouths, we could hardly bring ourselves to wish each other a sweet new year. Suddenly, the shehecheyanu thanksgiving with which we greet each holiday rang with a frightening literalness. Our state of shock was too acute for comforting, like that of a mourner before the funeral.
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On Radical Amazement
Sep 6, 2002 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Rosh Hashanah | Yom Kippur
Great theology is the reflective end result of religious experience. If we can identify the underlying experience, it will be easier for us to fathom the abstraction. This has been for me, at least, the key to penetrating a well-known Talmudic statement that has captivated me all summer. Familiarity often obscures meaning. I share the comment of R. Yohanan with you in the hope that it will enrich your High Holy Day season.
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How To Choose Life
Aug 31, 2002 By Melissa Crespy | Commentary | Nitzavim | Vayeilekh | Rosh Hashanah
We stand at an exciting and important time in the Jewish year. We stand less than two weeks before Rosh Hashanah, when so many of us will spend hours in synagogue praying for a good, healthy and fulfilling new year. We stand in a moment of transition, filled with potential. There is so much we can do, so much we can learn, so much we can become.
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“The World Belongs to God”
Aug 24, 2002 By Lewis Warshauer | Commentary | Ki Tavo | Pesah | Rosh Hashanah
The month of Elul is a time for preparation for the High Holy Days. Some industrious hosts and hostesses are already making tzimmes and putting it in the freezer. Other kinds of preparations are being made, too– studying, thinking about and discussing the themes and meanings of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur so that these holidays are not just repetitions of prior years. Even our weekly Torah readings, seemingly disconnected from anything to do with the High Holy Days, can be read through Elul eyeglasses.
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“Into the Woods” and into Elul
Aug 24, 2002 By Marc Wolf | Commentary | Ki Tavo
“Once upon a time in a far-off kingdom, lived a young maiden, a sad young lad, and a childless bakery” thus opens the story that develops into Stephen Sondheim’s current revival on Broadway, Into the Woods. Cleverly weaving our classic fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm, Sondheim composes a fable with classic, yet new significance. He begins with the foundation of the moral lessons of the children’s fairy tales like Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood and Jack and the Beanstalk, and builds upon them by watching as their characters interact with one another.
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