Parashat Ha Shavua Commentaries

Reb Elimelech of Lizensk (d.1787) would teach that the holiness of the week to come is contained in the Shabbat that precedes it. Often I think about this teaching in the manner that I was taught of Winnicott's interpretation of parental containment. The parent contains the child in a way that then gives a child the freedom to seek and search, to be independent and free. In the same way, the Shabbat before a holiday 'holds' the holiday within it, it holds all the aspirations and intentions that one carries in regard to the upcoming holiday. Read more...

We walk on streets and don't see the homeless folks. We work in our office and don't see the coworker who is abused. We don't see that the man who has been sitting next to you in synagogue for a year is gay and closeted and desperately wants to be out and welcomed. Read more...

In religion, it seems, there are few things in which we can hold absolute certainty. But, of this I am sure: ask a room full of people to share a moment in which they felt the presence of God, and most certainly many will identify the birth of a child as such a moment. When I speak to groups, and here the immediacy of this answer, I will often ask them to come up with another example, thinking that perhaps identifying the moment of a child's birth is the obvious or easy example. So, thinking I can offer a chance for intellectual and spiritual challenge, I will encourage another response. Read more...

These are AWESOME days. As our hearts reach out to those suffering in Japan, we cannot help but be simultaneously broken by the magnitude of more than 10,000 dead, and touched, awestruck by the sheer will of the human spirit to endure nine days under rubble, as two survivors did. Equally confounding is the complexity in Libya where cruise missiles and military might are being used to save lives. And as I write this, Israel enters yet another "phase" of conflict. The power of Nature and the power of Human Beings are both unpredictable and beyond comprehension. Read more...

I consider myself very fortunate that due to quirk in the calendar, I do not need to write about Parashat Tzav this week. This is the Shabbat that precedes the holiday of Purim (which, in fact, begins immediately at the end of Shabbat this year), and so is the Shabbat known as Shabbat Zakhor, the Shabbat of "Remember!" It is so called because of the first word of the special passage we read as a maftir, Deut. 25:17-19: Read more...