Parashat Ha Shavua Commentaries

Yom Kippur is intensely personal, a day of introspection and repentance on an individual level too. Read more...

For 24 years, I officiated at Rosh Hashanah services at several synagogues.  Some of the synagogues put together books of readings to augment the Rosh Hashanah liturgy by focusing on a variety of themes of the holy day in contemporary ways.  Many of the readings were good, but one has stuck in my head ever since the first time I read it.  I do not know who wrote it, but it may well have been Rabbi Jack Riemer, who wrote a number of poignant additional readings for this time of the Jewish year. Here are the lines that I want to quote and explore: Read more...

For those participating in the project known as Daf Yomi – the daily study of a two-sided page of the Babylonian Talmud, meant to take one through the entire work in seven and a half years – we are currently just about half way through the current cycle, in the midst of Gittin, the talmudic tractate about divorce law. But in the digressive way of the Talmud, Gittin also contains one of the most sustained rabbinic narratives, or series of narratives more or less stitched together, on the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 c.e. Read more...

The fast of the seventeenth of Tammuz is like Salieri to the ninth of Av’s Mozart—overshadowed by the fast that commemorates the destruction of both first and second Temples (Mishnah Ta’anit 4:6) and therefore overlooked in contemporary Jewish culture. Jews will still be going hungry on the lesser dawn-till-dark fast. The seventeenth still memorializes the day that Moses came down from Mt. Sinai, saw the lascivious feasting and dancing around the Golden Calf and broke the tablets that had just been given him by God. Read more...

For years, July 4th was an annual reunion as my extended family gathered poolside to enjoy good food and relaxing celebration leading to evenings of magnificent sounds and colors of fireworks.  Family trips were scheduled with anticipation of seeing relatives and frolicking together.  Still, I am keenly aware this day was not always marked with such frivolity or individual vacation-like activities. Read more...