Ariel Dunat – Senior Sermon (’25)
Feb 12, 2025 By JTS Senior Sermon | Commentary | Senior Sermon | Yitro
Yitro
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The Confusion of Revelation
Feb 14, 2025 By Barry Holtz | Commentary | Yitro
We have now come to Parashat Yitro in our annual Torah reading cycle, arguably the most significant sedra in the Humash. While Parashat Bereishit has the mythic power of the creation stories and Parashat Beshallah includes the narrative of the Exodus from Egypt and the miraculous crossing of the Sea, it is in Yitro that […]
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Amalya Volz – Senior Sermon (RS ’24)
Feb 1, 2024 By JTS Senior Sermon | Commentary | Senior Sermon | Yitro
Yitro All the Class of 2024 Senior Sermons
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The Limitations God Shares with Us
Feb 2, 2024 By Gordon Tucker | Commentary | Yitro
But how do you reconcile the idea of God’s transcendent power with such things as a failure to anticipate human flaws, or a weakness for the smell of roasting meat, or jealousy, or suffering the travails of exile? Texts such as these raise eyebrows because they seem to lower God in our estimation.
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How Do We Meet At Sinai?
Feb 10, 2023 By Amelia Wolf | Commentary | Yitro
At the moment God initiates a new covenant with the People of Israel, they must learn to demarcate the spaces of their new relationship. Some of these boundaries are lines drawn by God. Others are fences maintained by human beings. How can humanity and the Divine exist in the same space and time? And what can we learn about how humans can exist in relationship with each other from that encounter?
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Strangers at a Revelation
Jan 21, 2022 By Miriam Feldmann Kaye | Commentary | Yitro
Parashat Yitro is framed by the geographical and conceptual ideas of exile and homecoming. Against the backdrop of Bereishit, the notion of movement is critical in framing the experiences of biblical characters: the exile from Eden; the exile of Cain; the “calls” to Abraham, Jacob, and others to move, relocate, and find new homes.
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Can God Prohibit an Emotion?
Feb 5, 2021 By Sarah Wolf | Commentary | Yitro
Part of my current research focuses on how human emotions are discussed and legislated in the Talmud and other ancient rabbinic texts, and so the last of the Ten Commandments (as counted in the Jewish tradition) raises for me some fundamental questions.
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Expanding the Circle of Revelation
Feb 12, 2020 By Daniel Nevins | Commentary | Yitro
Are women Jews? This shocking question, first phrased by the feminist scholar Rachel Adler, is linked by Judith Plaskow to our portion in her 1990 book, Standing Again at Sinai. When Moses descends from the mountain to prepare the people for revelation, he tells them, “Be ready for the third day; do not go near a woman” (Exod. 19:15). Sexual contact makes one temporarily impure, and God wanted the people to receive the revelation in a state of purity. As Plaskow notes, Moses could have said, “men and women do not go near each other,” but instead he addresses only the men. She writes, “In this passage, the Otherness of women finds its way into the very center of Jewish experience.”
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