Parashat Ha Shavua Commentaries

Ours is an angry age. Confronted with ever higher levels of violence, with movies and television shows that grow ever more graphic and explicit in their brutality and glorification of cruelty, with neighborhoods no longer safe for a stroll and schools no longer safe for children, we respond to our pain by lashing out. Three strikes and you’re out, while reflecting our rage, is breaking our jails. And we’re too mad to care—let them rot! Read more...

The foundation of the age-long tradition of celebrating the Passover Seder derives from a statement in the Mishnah which says, “In every generation, each inpidual is obligated to see him/herself as if he/she personally was redeemed from Egypt.  As the Torah teaches ‘You shall teach your children on that day, saying it is because of what the Lord did for me when I went free from Egypt…’” Each year as we recite the Seder, we say these words that embody the entirety of the Seder’s imperative.  Our mission of the evening is to relive the experience of our ancestors, and our Seder Read more...

As we approach the last few days of Passover, we also approach the culmination of the many miracles that brought our people to freedom. Beginning with the marvelous story of Joseph in Egypt, of his remarkable dreams and his ability to save Egypt from famine, we witnessed the enslavement of the Israelites, the birth of Moses and his extraordinary upbringing in Pharaoh's palace. Upon discovering his true nature, Moses revolts against the stifling cruelty of Pharaoh's power, fleeing to Median where he encounters a bush that burns yet is not consumed. Read more...

All too often, events in our lives or the lives of those we love reminds us that we are not able to shape life at our will.  The world proceeds without consulting our preferences or desires, and people come in and out of our lives based on their own complex needs, not our own.  When the world doesn’t go according to our plans, our response is often one of sorrow or of frustration.  Read more...

This week’s Torah portion, Parashat Tazria, deals with a range of afflictions and illnesses that the Torah labels as tzara’at. While commonly mistranslated as leprosy (the illnesses actually have very little in common with Hansen’s Disease), Rabbi Jacob Milgrom translates it as “scale disease” and understands the illness as pine retribution for a moral sin or a sin against God. For moderns, we read this week’s description of the afflicted person, the metzora, against at least two different back-drops: the old Bible movies of Cecille B. Read more...