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Sitting in God’s Presence

Nov 6, 2009 By Abigail Treu | Commentary | Text Study | Vayera

What do we find ourselves doing when God’s Presence suddenly appears to us?

Our Lying Patriarch

Oct 21, 2009 By Abigail Treu | Commentary | Toledot

The evidence stared at us: a hot pink eye embedded in dark skin. “Which one of you did this?” my mother demanded. I, of course, knew the secret, having mashed the Bubbilicious bubble gum into a crack in the dark-stained paneling of our family room some hours earlier. My little sister, trying to be helpful, asked with what I knew to be complete innocence: “Well, what kind of gum is it?” Which was all our mother needed to hear to jump to a conclusion that brought her investigation to its end and my sister to her inevitable reprimand.

God in Mourning

Oct 3, 2009 By Abigail Treu | Commentary | Noah

Another interpretation of “And on the seventh day the waters of the Flood came upon the earth” (Gen. 7:10)

Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said: Seven days the Holy One, Blessed be He, mourned for His world before bringing the flood, the proof being the text, “And the Lord regretted that He had made man on earth, and His heart was saddened” (Gen. 6:6).

Standing at the Foot of God’s Mountain

Aug 29, 2009 By Abigail Treu | Commentary | Ki Tetzei

My beautiful daughter is no longer a newborn at fourteen weeks. Even more striking than the swift flow of time since her birth is the fleeting function of memory. I can no longer picture her in my mind as she looked in the first few weeks, just as I can no longer imagine my five-year-old son the way he looked when he was fourteen weeks old—or my little sister, now in her thirties, as she looked when we were kids. The images replace themselves, as a teacher of mine once put it.

The Question of Fracking

Aug 2, 2008 By Abigail Treu | Commentary | Masei

Golda Meir famously quipped: “Let me tell you the one thing I have against Moses. He took us forty years into the desert in order to bring us to the one place in the Middle East that has no oil!”