This year’s weekly Torah cycle continues from now until after the fall holidays in a DIY – Chevruta style. Yes, the students are now the teachers. Although we have focused on Kabbalistic texts, especially Zohar, this year, you are free to offer whatever you wish…it’s summer! If you wish to …
Let’s celebrate Shabbat face-to-face and on zoom together. For those who are vaccinated and boosted (please bring proof or submit via email in advance), we will welcome Shabbat in the sanctuary, with R. David and Your Band by the Sea! Please wear a mask, and stay home if you don’t …
Let’s celebrate Shabbat face-to-face and on zoom together. For those who are vaccinated and boosted (please bring proof or submit via email in advance), we will welcome Shabbat in the sanctuary, with R. David and Your Band by the Sea! Please wear a mask, and stay home if you don’t …
This year’s weekly Torah cycle continues from now until after the fall holidays in a DIY – Chevrutah style. Yes, the students …
Let’s celebrate Shabbat face-to-face and on zoom together. For those who are vaccinated and boosted (please bring proof or submit via email …
This year’s weekly Torah cycle with R. David will use ancient and modern midrash (stories growing from apparent “gaps” in Torah) to …
By Rabbi David Shanah tovah. May 5781 dawn bright for you and your beloveds. Last night we introduced our High Holy Day …
Shoftim includes one of Torah’s most famous lines (and, to a Jewish judge, the most pivotal): צֶ֥דֶק צֶ֖דֶק תִּרְדֹּ֑ף לְמַ֤עַן תִּֽחְיֶה֙ (tzedek, tzedek tirdof) / “Justice, justice you must pursue, so you will live” (Deut. 16:20). While early tradition read this phrase as a call to honor court decisions (so we don’t take the law into our own hands), later generations read it philosophically, sensing in its repeat of the word צֶ֖דֶק (justice) two separate levels of justice – one human commended to our hands, another divine beyond human grasp.
The Book of Deuteronomy and this week’s portion (Devarim) open with Moses’ second telling of Israel’s journey. The name Deuteronomy hails from the Greek for “second law,” which begs why Moses repeats himself at all.
Kedoshim (“Holiness”). Its familiar callings are timeless. We must be holy “for I, YHVH your God, am holy” (Lev. 19:2), and love a neighbor as ourselves” (Lev. 19:18). As Rabbi Hillel famously said in Talmud (Shabbat 31a), the call to love others as ourselves – to love the holy Godspark within – is Torah’s very essence. So vital is this “Golden Rule” that we revisit it each Yom Kippur, as reminder and clarion call.
