Whatever your feelings about the outcomes of the 2020 election, one thing is certain: We are a deeply divided country. We see these divisions even in our own families. Friendships have been destroyed, there have been online spats, and disagreements at family gatherings. Searching for answers, longing for comfort, we turn to our tradition. It’s…
The Torah inherited a Mesopotamian cultural consensus that a Great Deluge had wiped out almost all of humanity. In the Gilgamesh epic, the gods (Anu and Enlil) inflict this catastrophe arbitrarily in a display of their power, but later defend their actions both as deserved punishment and designed to curb population growth. According to the…
Rashi famously suggests that if the Torah is primarily a book of laws — after all, it contains hundreds of laws — then the Five Books of Moses should start with the first law given to the whole people of Israel (in Exodus 12:1-2, we are told: “This month [Nissan] is the first of the…
At the end of the summer, synagogue pews tend to thin out. Congregants (and rabbis) are often on vacation, taking a break before the High Holidays. Some of us secular-cultural Jews who don’t attend synagogue in the first place also tend to detach from our engagement with organized Jewish life. This summer proves even more…
In the book of Genesis, Joseph works for an Egyptian master, Potiphar, and has control over all of his master’s worldly goods. He’s handsome and young — and Potiphar’s wife desire’s him. She asks him to sleep with her but he declines. Day after day she persists, and finally, on a day when no one…
The story of the Akedah — the binding of Isaac — seems out of touch with the times. As racism and nativism have shockingly returned to the halls of power, in the United States and abroad, we need to be roused to resistance and moved to vocal protest. As pressures for ideological conformity mount across…
As I read through the growing stream of #MeToo posts last week, I was among the many men unsure of how to respond. The experiences behind each post describing sexual harassment; some horrific, others horrifically commonplace, reflect a state of our culture that must reckon with how we allow men to treat women. Lest we…
It was a Thursday evening in the winter, and the sun was sinking as I waited at a bus stop in Givat Shaul, practicing to chant my Torah reading from photocopied sheets of paper. Moses was late in coming down the mountain, and the bus was late in coming to our part of Jerusalem, so…
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