Parashat Ha Shavua Commentaries

Sitting in the hospital, the man I am there to visit says to me: "Rabbi, I have reached the end of my options, and I am going to die. I am coming to terms with it and now, I only need to live long enough to see my son graduate from School." Over the years as a rabbi, some version of this scene has played itself out numerous times - a person knows s/he is dying and in the process of coming to terms only wants to live long enough to witness one last important moment in the life of one of their children or grandchildren. Read more...

Clichés can be meaningful. When spoken between two people who have a wealth of emotion and history, at a bar mitzvah, a wedding, or a funeral, a well worn cliché can be the vehicle for conveying deep and heartfelt joy or sadness. At those moments a cliché is the vessel, honed over many years by a culture, with which to say the things that matter. The vessel itself is not the feeling-it only conveys a feeling. Read more...

In this week's Torah Portion, we read of the Rebellion of Korah. An interesting word, "rebellion." I suspect that the difference between "rebellion" and "revolution" is neither the justice of the cause nor the support of the people; rather, it is the success or failure of the uprising. Had the insurrection been successful, had Korah and the Reubenites Dathan and Abiram succeeded in deposing Moses and setting themselves up as the leaders of Israel, we would be reading today about the "Revolution of Korah" instead of the "rebellion." Read more...

Here's a word that you rarely hear in a rabbinic sermon, unless I suppose you are a member of Valley Beth Shalom and Rabbi Harold Schulweis is speaking. The word is: Hyperthymesia: the documented condition in which a person is incapable of forgetting any detail of anything that ever happened to them. While there are times when some of us might wish for greater recall then we have most of the time, people who suffer from this condition actually suffer terribly. Read more...

When we doused our havdalah candle in wine this past Saturday evening, it had been a very long time since I had so deeply felt the meaning of the words traditional to that ritual moment: "Shavuah tov - a good week." The satirical web-site, The Onion, ran a piece towards the end of last week under the "headline" "Jesus, This Week" - the title meaning to represent the reaction to recent events of the ordinary Americans "interviewed" in the article. Read more...