Celebrating Human Initiative
Jun 8, 2002 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Shelah Lekha
A nation’s calendar is a contract between its past and future. What we choose to remember is indicative of what we value. Our calendar is always a projection of our priorities. The subject matter that joins this week’s parashah and haftarah, the conquest of Canaan, sheds some light on why one event and not another embeds itself in our collective memory.
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Our Journey in the Wilderness
Jun 4, 1994 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Shelah Lekha
The history of Israel in the wilderness is a textbook of religious wisdom. Perhaps the most basic principle it teaches is that miracles don’t create believers. We are inclined to think that given what the people had witnessed in Egypt and at the Reed Sea and before Mt. Sinai, they would have acquired an unmovable faith in God. And that is precisely what the Torah asserts after God rescued Israel at the Reed Sea, in a passage that we still recite daily in our morning prayers.
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Biblical Espionage
Jun 24, 1995 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Shelah Lekha | Tishah Be'av
The story of the twelve spies is well-known and straightforward. As Israel approaches the Promised Land from the south, God instructs Moses to assemble a band of spies, one prominent man from each tribe to measure the strength of its inhabitants: “Are the people who dwell in it strong or weak, few or many? Is the country in which they dwell, good or bad? Are the towns they live in, open or fortified? Is the soil rich or poor? Is it wooded or not? And take pains to bring back some of the fruit of the land” (Numbers 13:18-20).
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My Father’s Legacy
Jul 1, 1999 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Shelah Lekha
From the beginning, the culmination was to have been a land of their own. The progeny of Abraham, grown from a clan into a nation, would be freed from Egypt and returned to the land of Canaan, where once their ancestors briefly dwelled. But on the southern border at Kadesh, the people succumbed to a failure of nerve and decided to abort. The report of ten of the twelve spies sent by Moses to scout the land utterly demoralized them: “We looked liked grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them [the inhabitants of Canaan] (Numbers 14:33).” Fear overwhelmed their newly found faith, which rested largely on miracles rather than conviction. Clearly, in a single generation, God could take Israel out of slavery, but not the mindset of a slave out of Israel. A steady diet of miracles had merely perpetuated their state of dependency.
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Perception and Practice
Jul 1, 2000 By Matthew Berkowitz | Commentary | Shelah Lekha
Six years ago, while studying in Israel, a close friend, my father and I decided to make a two day camping trip to Eilat and then to St. Catherine’s Monastery which sits at the foot of what Christian tradition believes to be Mt. Sinai. For me, this was my second pilgrimage to this extraordinary site; my first hike up Jebel Musa (Mt. Sinai) had taken place two years earlier.
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My Grandfather’s Tallit
Jun 28, 2003 By Lisa Gelber | Commentary | Shelah Lekha
When I close my eyes to picture my grandfather, he is standing beside a long olive green bookcase, swaying and shokeling, his slight frame enfolded within his tallit, tefillin protruding from his forehead and wrapped about his arm, deeply engaged in conversation with God. At those moments, it always seemed that he had been transported to a different place and time. Perhaps it was that magic cape, I thought, the one with the strings attached. As a little girl, I yearned to wear a tallit, and so it is no surprise that some of my fondest childhood memories are of sitting with my grandfather in shul on Shabbat and sharing his tallit. Throughout the service, I would play with the tzitzit, enjoying the feel of the fringes as they slipped between my fingers, methodically adding new knots and removing them again before the conclusion of the service, each knot a blessing for myself or my family. My grandfather was a humble man, dedicated to his store, his family, and his God. He embodied a love for education and humanity. I knew that those cornerstones of his existence were somehow bound up within those carefully constructed knots.
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Overcoming the Past
Jun 12, 2004 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Shelah Lekha | Rosh Hashanah
This week’s parashah strikes a note that reverberates throughout the liturgy of our High Holy Day services: “I pardon (salahti), as you have asked (14:20).” Prayers for forgiveness (selihot-same word) punctuate the season of introspection from the week before Rosh Hashanah to the end of Yom Kippur. Not surprisingly, this verse from our parashah appears often in these prayers. The concept of atonement enables us to bridge the chasm between divine expectation and human reality. It prevents the perfect from becoming the enemy of the good. For humans, holiness is always a temporary state of being. Without forgiveness, we would find ourselves forever alienated from God.
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Seeing Life in 3D
Jun 20, 2009 By David M. Ackerman | Commentary | Shelah Lekha
Last Sunday, in honor of his seventy-fifth birthday, my father invited his eight grandchildren and their parents to join him on a guided visit of Ellis Island. Toward the conclusion of our tour, having taken in the key sites, we gathered outside, just beyond the stairs that led millions of immigrants from the processing hall and medical examinations to the ferries and barges that took them to Manhattan and beyond. At that spot, my dad shared with his grandchildren the story of his grandfather’s arrival in America, 110 years prior: in 1899, Nathan Mendelsohn, an eleven-year-old native of Iasi, Romania, traveled by ship from Rotterdam to New York.
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