Sanctifying Our Days
Aug 22, 2009 By Matthew Berkowitz | Commentary | Shofetim | Rosh Hashanah
What constitutes a life well-lived, a life of blessing, a life lived to its fullest? With this week marking Rosh Hodesh, the beginning of a new month, we pray for God to renew our lives in the coming month: “Grant us a long life, a peaceful life with goodness and blessing, sustenance and physical vitality, a life informed by purity and piety . . . a life of abundance and honor, a life embracing piety and love of Torah, a life in which our heart’s desires for goodness will be fulfilled” (Birkat HaHodesh). This Rosh Hodesh offers us a particularly auspicious moment to dwell upon this question of a life well-lived, for this week marks the beginning of Elul鈥攁 month in which we are encouraged to take a heshbon ha-nefesh, an accounting of our souls. At its essence, this idea demands that we look inward and become critical of ourselves and the year that has passed. This week’s parashah, Shof’tim, gives us one definition of a life of blessing that we can use in evaluating where we have come from and where we are going.
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Repentance in the Heart of Summer
Aug 15, 2009 By Andrew Shugerman | Commentary | Re'eh
At the end of Friday-night services this past July fourth weekend, the rabbi of a major urban synagogue beseeched those gathered to celebrate the secular holiday by joining the congregation or renewing their memberships immediately. The rabbi explained that this year, due to the global economic crisis, congregational finances had become a vital concern. A budget shortfall had forced the clergy and lay leadership to cancel their policy of selling tickets for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services to nonmembers in order to “encourage” more people to pay some level of membership dues. More grievously, the rabbi noted that the congregation’s diminished financial position might require cuts in social action programs upon which the neighborhood’s less fortunate depend. An infusion of cash from membership dues, though, would limit the impact of these cuts.
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The Book of Devarim and the Birth of Talmud Torah
Jul 25, 2009 By David Hoffman | Commentary | Devarim
Perhaps the greatest difference between the book of Devarim, which we begin this Shabbat, and the other four books of the Torah is the switch in modality. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers describe a story as it unfolds. The characters of these books experience these events as they occur in the moment. Not so the book of Devarim.
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Our Hope and Despair
Jul 18, 2009 By Mychal Springer | Commentary | Masei | Mattot | Tishah Be'av
We are now in the period known as the Three Weeks: the weeks between the fast of the seventeenth of Tammuz, which marks the day the outer walls of Jerusalem were breached by the Babylonians, and the ninth of Av, when the Babylonians destroyed the Temple. These weeks are the low point of the year. In a dramatic reversal of the ordinary mourning process, which begins in its starkest intensity and lifts over time as the mourners are comforted, these weeks of mourning increase in intensity as they move, inevitably, to the destruction of God’s house and the banishment of the people into exile. The prophetic readings drive home that we have brought this horrible tragedy on ourselves. This week’s haftarah, from chapter 2 of Jeremiah, is the second of three haftarot of affliction. Jeremiah chastises the people for having strayed from God and God’s Torah.
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The Torah’s Middle Path
Jul 11, 2009 By Daniel Nevins | Commentary | Pinehas
Is there ever a discernible gap between God’s morality and the Torah, or is the Torah itself our only window into the realm of divine values? Put another way, is it permissible for a reverent Jew to challenge the morality of a law, and to base this challenge on his or her own understanding of justice and thus God’s will?
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The Sin of Moses
Jul 4, 2009 By Deborah Miller | Commentary | Balak | Hukkat
Everyone knows how Romeo and Juliet ends, and yet we still cry when they die. The same is true of the first of the two Torah portions we read this week, Parashat Hukkat/Balak. In this portion, we learn that Moses will not enter the Promised Land. We have heard or read this story every year, and yet we are still upset, still angry that, on the threshold, Moses is denied admission to the Land to which he has been leading the Israelites for forty years.
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Seeing Life in 3D
Jun 20, 2009 By David M. Ackerman | Commentary | Shelah Lekha
Last Sunday, in honor of his seventy-fifth birthday, my father invited his eight grandchildren and their parents to join him on a guided visit of Ellis Island. Toward the conclusion of our tour, having taken in the key sites, we gathered outside, just beyond the stairs that led millions of immigrants from the processing hall and medical examinations to the ferries and barges that took them to Manhattan and beyond. At that spot, my dad shared with his grandchildren the story of his grandfather’s arrival in America, 110 years prior: in 1899, Nathan Mendelsohn, an eleven-year-old native of Iasi, Romania, traveled by ship from Rotterdam to New York.
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Becoming Builders
Jun 6, 2009 By Marc Wolf | Commentary | Naso
I imagine that all of us have noticed that the only thing unequivocally going up right now is the number of pundits鈥攑rofessional and amateur鈥攚ho are chiming in on what it is that economic indicators seem to be telling us. At kiddush in my shul, in airports, on television, and certainly on the Internet, anywhere you turn there are people pontificating about where the economy is headed. While you will certainly hear no projection here, in my own reading what caught my eye were two economic indicators that focus specifically on construction and building.
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