Who鈥檚 Judging?
Aug 29, 2014 By Danielle Upbin | Commentary | Shofetim
In the opening verses of our Torah portion, the Israelites are commanded to establish a fair, impartial, and moral judicial system upon settling the Land of Israel.
Read More
How to Practice Faith
Aug 22, 2014 By Daniel Nevins | Commentary | Re'eh
Watch a world-class athlete do something extraordinary, like somersault and twist through the air from a high diving platform or serve a tennis ball so fast down the line that it seems fired by a cannon.
Read More
Waters of Uncertainty
Aug 15, 2014 By Alisa Braun | Commentary | Eikev
鈥淚f it doesn鈥檛 rain, we don鈥檛 know what鈥檚 going to happen,鈥� commented a NASA water-cycle scientist recently on the drought that has been devastating California.
Read More
The Comfort of Prayer
Aug 8, 2014 By Jan Uhrbach | Commentary | Va'et-hannan
Parashat Va’et-hannan contains some of the most inspiring and sweepingly grand passages in the entire Torah, and some of the best known, including the Ten Commandments and the first paragraph of the Shema.
Read More
The True Sin of Korah
Jun 23, 2012 By Samuel Barth | Commentary | Korah
“Now Korah, son of Izhar son of Kohath son of Levi, betook himself . . . ” These are the opening words of our parashah from Etz Hayim, the humash of the Conservative Movement, which uses a translation that generally avoids archaic English vocabulary and style. So, we should be puzzled that this translation employs a word that is certainly not a part of common usage. Why not simply say, “Now Korah took“?
Read More
Living the Life Waiting for Us
Jul 7, 2012 By Abigail Treu | Commentary | Balak
Each of us has our version of the story: the infertility, the divorce, the toilet flooding before the Rosh Hashanah guests arrive. Mentsch tracht, gott lacht: man plans, God laughs, as the Yiddish expression goes. Only, most of the time it really doesn’t seem so funny.
Read More
Religious Moderation in the Face of Extremism
Jul 14, 2012 By Marc Wolf | Commentary | Pinehas
The brutal sentence Pinhas was carrying out was one levied by God at the beginning of chapter 25, but we cannot begin to comprehend the emotional and spiritual trauma that resulted in executing, or even witnessing, this aggressive meting out of God’s justice.
Read More
The View From the Other Side
Aug 1, 2014 By Stephen P. Garfinkel | Commentary | Devarim
Is the author of this week鈥檚 Torah reading, Parashat Devarim, or the author of the entire book of Devarim (Deuteronomy, the last of the five books of the Torah), not paying attention?
Read More