If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
The Blog
This week's Torah portion, Naso, is a dramatic reminder of women's vulnerability. One of the most notorious ordeals regarding women is found within it.
I confess! I am a freeaholic. What is a freeaholic? I am addicted to offering things to other people for free. But there is no such things as a free lunch, so it is time to look at my own behavior.
f we are to negotiate the coming years safely, we may need a new kind of leadership. We need the rediscovery of an ancient kind of leadership that has rarely been given the prominence it deserves. I mean the leader as teacher.
Never has the spiritual force of revelation affected me more than it did on the early morning of May 31, 1998.
Just as there is a background sound permeating all the universe as a result of the initial instant of the big bang, we can say similarly that there is a spiritual background voice in the world resulting from the giving of the Torah at Sinai.
I'm a rabbi. But I won't be observing the Shavuot holiday this weekend. Not because I don't have the time. It's because the traditional message of Shavuot doesn't speak to me.
Saturday night is the anniversary of the giving of Torah at Mt. Sinai. Strange, isn't it, that on the holy day we celebrate the Giving of the Law, we traditionally study the Book of Ruth, the most transgressive of the Bible, a book that explicitly defies a Divine command.
One year, one month and one day after the Exodus. God speaks to Moses in the Tent of Meeting in the desert at Sinai, telling him: Take a census of the Children of Israel. Count their names. All the men, 20 years of age or older.
Each person will have to come to terms with their own fears in their own way. The most helpful first step is to have the intention to live without fear and then to seek every path that will help in realizing that intention.
To see a Republican lawmaker and a prominent Christian pastor try to outdo each other in their bigotry and murderous hate puts in unpleasant but clear relief the moral health of the organizations they represent.
Christians have often hoped for a time when our racial and economic differences would cease, when in Christ we would all be indistinguishable. Such impulses are earnest but fundamentally misguided.
Both religion and politics are concerned with how we should organize societies. What does the Bible tell us about how we are supposed to organize our common life together so that we can actually bear the image of God to all creation?
Ezekiel spoke the difficult truth to a community in exile: perpetual sin left them spinning their wheels, going nowhere. His vision of a wheel within a wheel provided a new mechanism not only for prayer, but also for hope itself.
Most of the people in my Sunday school class are immigrants -- they know very well what it is like to be living in a land where everything around you is foreign to you, and you're foreign to the people around you.
Conflating biblical understandings of forgiveness with individual, therapeutic notions distorts the biblical text and creates pressure on individual victims.
Those of us whose faith demands that we protect all of God's Creation should be vocal in defending our holy texts from those whose shortsighted anthropocentrism causes them to deny the earth's fragility and human culpability.
