Parashat Ha Shavua Commentaries

We leave well before dawn and as we speed toward daybreak I keep asking myself how it is that I'm now the parent of a college student. After all, I can still remember vividly the details of my own freshman year so many years ago. Read more...

I recently read a book by P.J. Long, a mom who suffered a traumatic brain injury when she fell off a horse. In her book, Gifts from a Broken Jar, she recounts this story from India about a village boy who brought water to a wealthy man.   Read more...

It took almost a decade until Professor Moshe Idel helped me retrieve my dignity and relationship with Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki, 1040-1105). I flunked Rashi in third grade - I received a "C" - I couldn't read Rashi script to save my life. The shame sat with me for years. I thought I had overcome being "Rashi-challenged" until my first exam on Rashi in tenth grade. Our Torah teacher listed 10 verses of the Chumash that we had not learned yet in class, and asked us to answer "What was Rashi's question? Read more...

Nowadays, I refer to it as my "quasi-Orthodox" phase. It was that transitional time in my life between high school and college, when I joined one of the early groups of United Synagogue Youth's Nativ year program in Israel for recent high school graduates (a program my own son will be attending beginning this fall!), and found myself beginning to develop my own, personal, on-the-way-to-adulthood relationship with Judaism and Jewish practice. Read more...

This week's parashah continues the teachings concerning the sanctuary. It discusses lighting the menorah, the observance of Pesakh Sheni for those unable to observe Passover in its proper time, laws of the first-born and the Levites, and the procedures for breaking camp and walking in the wilderness. Read more...