While the word “insurrection” may trigger fresh emotions for Americans in the wake of January 6, 2021, power struggles are nothing new to human history. One look at today’s headlines reaffirms that this tradition is alive and well: tens of thousands of anti-government protesters in Tel Aviv, snap elections in France, gang warfare in Haiti, murdered protesters of a tax hike in Kenya. In the same...Read more...
“We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are,” the writer Anais Nin famously remarked.
The very same might be said of Torah, especially this Shabbat as we reflect on the portion Shelach Lecha. The opening of this parsha tells a story that is all about how we see, and how we are seen.
It’s about the images of ourselves that we carry in our mind’s eye…...Read more...
This past Tuesday evening our congregation celebrated Shavuot, with guests from Gishrei Shalom in Southington. It is it is a beautiful holiday; at once a harvest festival and the Season of Revelation hearkening back to the Israelites first hearing the words of our ancient covenant at Mt. Sinai. After seven weeks of counting the omer and, step by step, coming closer to this moment, we find that in the words of a past student of...Read more...
Nonetheless, endless numerical metrics have been used throughout my life to quantify my worth: SAT. GPA. IQ. AP. FICO. Salary. Tax bracket. Age. Weight. BMI. Numbers are dehumanizing. They paint in broad strokes, revealing little if anything of the humans they purport to define. Numbers know nothing of love, meaning,...Read more...
In his D’var Torah on the portion Bechukotai this week, renowned rabbi (and brilliant, prolific writer) David Wolpe reflects on the very first word: “im,” or if. “If contains all of life’s regrets,” he writes. “But even more, im is a word of possibility. God says, “IF you walk in My ways.” We hold the im in our own hands.
What he is pointing out here is that our lives are filled with uncertainty, as well...Read more...
I don’t know about you, but for me it’s been a long week. A long year even. As the saying goes, there’s always something. And stressful situations do not always wait for the previous ones to resolve themselves before showing up, uninvited. If we are lucky enough to have put out all the metaphorical fires, we might be tempted to sit back and pat ourselves on the back for a moment, but the feeling that we must be forgetting...Read more...
“Teach Us To Number Our Days, that we may acquire a heart of wisdom.”
(Proverbs 90:12)
In ancient days, our ancestors would offer their first barley sheaf of the season at the Temple in Jerusalem on the second day of Passover. From there, according to a commandment in the Torah, they would...Read more...
In 1948, Jean-Paul Sartre premiered a play entitled Les mains sales, or The Dirty Hands, in which this famous (translated) quote was featured:
“You cling so tightly to your purity, my lad! How terrified you are of sullying your hands. Well, go ahead then, stay pure! What good will it do, and why even bother coming here among us? Purity is a concept of fakirs...Read more...
Blessed is God who spoke, and the world came to be.”
This is a line from our Shabbat morning liturgy which I’ve always loved. Now that TBD has begun holding services on the last Saturday morning of most months[1] we’ll all have the opportunity to acquaint ourselves with these words and the melody to which it’s set.
Why does my heart resonate to this opening...Read more...
