Blogs

FLOOD? TOWER? WHAT IS THIS – TAROT??

This week’s Torah portion Noach is one of only three named for a non-Jewish protagonist (the others are Yitro and Balak) and it contains stories of mythic proportions: the warning of the Flood, the actual water, the recovery after the Flood to name a few. These are all motifs found in other cultures creation...Read more...

SHABBAT SUKKOT 5783 – CHESHIRE

I miss Israel more during Sukkot… especially on Lotan, so let me wax nostalgic and paint a picture of what Sukkot looks like at home for me. Immediately after the shofar is blown and we’ve sung “l’shana ha-ba’ah byerushalayim” after Neilah, several tall people come forward with the first of dozens of...Read more...

The question of legacy is a fraught one in this modern era of ours. On the one hand, most of us know that we stand on the shoulders of giants, that knowing about gravity at a young age doesn’t make us smarter than Isaac Newton and that the creation of new ideas and technologies would not have been possible without those who came before. But ask anyone who has had to replace a dishwasher or a telephone...Read more...

Our Torah portion this week “Ki Tetzei” begins “When you’ll go out to war against your enemies…” (Deut. 21:10). The opening incident concerns a prison of war, a beautiful woman, who the victor wants to take as a wife. Obviously, in modern times this would be considered a war crime and not reflective of Jewish ethics. In the Biblical milieu war was a fact of life, and injury was common. Only last week we...Read more...

Over the past week in Morocco, I have been piecing together a very wobbly understanding of the Jewish history in this country. I see signs of Jewish presence everywhere. In the first century Roman ruins of Volubilis, for example, one can see epitaphs engraved in Hebrew on ancient stones. There are synagogues...Read more...