by Rabbi Misha
My nieces and nephews hear the sounds of rockets falling. My parents, walking or driving along, hear the alarms, and either rush into the entrance room of some building, or lie down on the ground with their heads covering their heads.
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This week I share a piece of a longer paper I wrote a few years ago that tries to dig and find what lies beneath Kosher laws. Enjoy.
Read Moreby Rabbi Misha
This week I share a piece of a longer paper I wrote a few years ago that tries to dig and find what lies beneath Kosher laws. Enjoy.
by Rabbi Misha
The Floyd family, and the events of this week have filled my mind with beautiful questions about the nature of prayer. I watched many different family members react to the verdict, and every one of them spoke about prayer.
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Something extraordinary happened this week. 280,000 people gathered from across the universe, most of them from Israel and Palestine, to mourn those killed on both sides of the conflict. The joint Israeli Palestinian memorial ceremony is laying the ground for a different future.
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This Sunday, as part of the Kumah Festival we will be commemorating Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, which takes place today. The event will search for a way to acknowledge and mourn the past while leading us toward a new, forward looking relationship with memory.
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Tomorrow night we begin a seven-week journey that will attempt to lead us from doubt to acceptance, from possibility to actuality, from the Red Sea to Mount Sinai. We begin our Kumah Festival learning from the former black slaves of Morocco how to transform their Boulila, their chains, into Hamdulillah, praise, through music.
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We have some live virtual theater coming our way tonight, so I’ll begin with a line from a play - PHARAOH: When you finally get this freedom, Moses, what are you going to do with it?
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With Passover around the corner we hear the call of freedom. This week’s parasha, Vayikra begins with Moses hearing God’s call.
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This week’s Parasha is perhaps the most New Shul of them all. Its hero is Bezalel Ben Uri, the artist who builds the Mishkan, the travelling desert temple.
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I pick up the theme we discussed a couple of weeks ago, of the ways our ancestors live with us, by sharing a poem I wrote about a beautiful Covid-times Bar Mitzvah.
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Purim is healthiest of our holidays, because we get to embody the opposite of our so called reality. Finally we rid ourselves of ourselves, our ideas, our understanding of how things "are."
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The month of Adar, month of joy in the Hebrew calendar, began for me one week ago with a sighting of a few families of dolphins swimming happily in the frigid ocean. I am spending a week by the rather stormy Atlantic, and despite the weather have been able to watch large birds fly over the water, medium birds fly high and plunge down into the water, and small birds with long beaks run into the very shallow water, all of them in search of fish.
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Willow, a bright twelve-year-old student answered my question in a way I had never heard before. “Why do you want to have a Bat Mitzvah,” I asked. “Tradition,” she said, “should be something we think of every day.”
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The letter is about French philosopher Levinas' notion of the face. It begins like this:
Emmanuel Levinas explains it like this: when we see another’s face, we are commanded “Thou shalt not murder.”
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Smack in the middle of Prospect Park stands a majestic tree with dozens of dancing arms and an enormous protective lump jutting out at eyes’ height. Its chunky roots sprawl out and cover the area beneath its trees all around its fat trunk, far too wide to hug. I’m not the only one attracted to it, which is evident by the dollops of paint in different colors that people have left on that protective lump, in the way that is done to holy trees in India, or the Jerusalem mountains.
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When the prophet Haggai returned to Israel from the exile in Babylon, much like we seem to have returned home this week, he found the Jews depressed, “each person rushing to their own home,” with no eyes for others, or for the rebuilding of the temple for which they returned. He gathered the Jews in front of the ruins of the temple and said: “Today is the day the Temple was erected!”
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James Meredith walked into the campus of University of Mississippi in 1962 escorted by three jeeps full of soldiers, the first African American student there. As a symbol of the Civil Rights Movement one might expect Meredith to support MLK’s vision of nonviolent resistance.
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Many things are true today that seemed like dreams a week ago. We are in a state of vulnerability and potentiality. We have been confronted with beautiful and terrifying realities. What do we do? Who do we trust?
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