Listen to an audio version Courage has many faces. It can mean saying no to compromise, or it can mean making a difficult compromise. It can entail dying a heroic death or living through terrible pain. It can mean fighting…
Tag: Jewish
Toledot – The Power of Blessing
Listen to an audio version We tend to think of people; who lived long before us as primitive and less intelligent. Yet, contemporary Americans have made the alternative medicine industry a multi-billion-dollar throwback to the ancient craft of herb…
Chaye Sarah – The Ongoing Miracle of a Life Well Lived
Listen to an audio version It is noteworthy that this week’s portion, which is entitled, Chaye Sarah, the life of Sarah, actually chronicles the matriarch’s death and burial, and her husband’s contemplative mourning. It begins though with a one sentence…
Lech Lecha – The Syntax of Silence
These are anxious times. Many people are facing significant changes in their lives and the long-standing institutions that help inform their lives and lend them a sense of security. People often feel insecure regarding their safety, their finances and the…
B’reishit – Facing Our Other Side, East of Eden
As we begin to explore this story of humankind outside the Garden of Eden, we like Cain should be uncomfortable with our first encounter being fratricide. Yet if we are honest with ourselves, we need to admit that we walk…
Nitsavim – Choose Life
Listen to an audio version God is dead! Or so some would say, such as Richard Rubinstein the esteemed former professor of religion at University of Florida and Bridgeport University. As a leading cultural analyst, and a most prominent…
Matot – A Place of Refuge
This week’s Torah portion contains a theme that in the ancient world was peculiar to the religion of Israel – the compassion, care and grace of their patron God. A historically popular approach to theology is to bifurcate of the…
Pinchas – Proper Enthusiasm
Listen to an audio version There are always two unseen guests at every bris, neither has been specifically invited, yet the spirit of each is evoked. Of course Elijah is the first unseen guest as he often is…
Chukat – Three Children of Amram, Two Strange Cows, and A Perpetual Living Stream
Listen to an audio version Parashat Chukat is among the most enigmatic in all of Torah. While it gives closure to the lives of Moses siblings, it opens three new mysteries in the fabric of Israel’s, story, a peculiar ordinance,…
Korach – You Say You Want a Revolution
Do you ever have, as one children’s book would describe it, a “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day”? Well, Moses sure did. In fact, it must have seemed to him like he had fourteen thousand six hundred days…