Parashat Ha Shavua Commentaries

This next week, our country will elect a new president. A general fear of the unknown looms over us like a wall cloud before a tornado. We do not know where it will hit or when, or if at all, but the green, dark sky teases us about what might come. One scary aspect of this election is the name-calling and labeling, and the neglect of any concern about how we might falsely characterize others in an attempt to draw people nearer to our own point-of-view. We are each of us born into this world without a name, character or story. Read more...

A few days ago, we celebrated Simchat Torah, the festival of completing the annual reading of the Torah and the re-starting of a new cycle. Consequently, this week we no longer find ourselves wandering in the desert, but back once again at the beginning of it all. Read more...

It finally really hit me last Tuesday night that the High Holy Days are coming, while I was sitting outside at LA's gorgeous Hollywood Bowl for a concert. A cool breeze blew through the hills, I momentarily shivered, and in that instant I knew it was autumn: time for honey cake; and shofarot; and also time for repentance. Why did this realization about the impending Days of Awe come to me then, I wondered, instead of in front of a sacred book, or at our beautiful minyan, while reciting the Hebrew month's extra Psalm preparing us for the High Holy Days? Read more...

A remarkable revolution has hit the Jewish world: for the first time in its history, the Federations and secular organizations acknowledge that Jewish education must be one of the highest priorities of the entire Jewish community.  Funding that used to go to “Jewish” hospitals and other institutions whose Jewishness consisted primarily in the ethnicity of its top staff (rather than any distinctive programming or services offered) now must take a back seat to the explicitly Jewish concern of talmud torah (Jewish learning). Why the shift? Read more...

Author Jane Tillner, in a book called Nothing, tells the story of Pierre-Anthon, a seventh grader who learns about death and realizes there is no meaning to life. Pierre leaves his classroom, climbs a tree, and stays there. Despite their greatest efforts, his classmates cannot make him come down, not even by pelting him with rocks. Read more...