A Southern California synagogue is having its third annual “blessing of the animals.”

Congregation Dor Hadash in San Diego holds the event in honor of Tu b’Shevat, the 15th day of Nissan, which this year falls on Jan. 20.

Pet owners are invited to bring their pets to the Reconstructionist shul by noon Sunday, Jan. 9, where they will be blessed by Rabbi Yael Ridburg. Furred, winged and swimming creatures are all welcome—from cats to turtles.

Tu b’Shevat is known as the new year of trees, and is one of four “new year” celebrations on the Jewish calendar. Some Jews expand the holiday to include blessings for all living things produced by the earth, including plants and animals.

According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, last year’s blessing ceremony included the audience responding: “May they never suffer from ick, and may their fins and scales always sparkle in the light of your sunshine.”

Alex, Ryan, Josh and Ellie Dubin light about 25 menorahs every night of Chanukah

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From painted-clay preschool classics to sterling silver family heirlooms, the eight bright lights of the chanukiyah have a unique and artful way of revealing our values, holding our histories and telling our stories.

That’s a Big Ball of Wax

As a preschooler, Alex Dubin was always mesmerized by Chanukah candles. Every year, he would sit and stare as the flames danced over his growing collection of menorahs — the projects he created in school; or the ones he made with his grandmother, a ceramic artist; or with his mother, herself pretty crafty.

Today, Alex, 17, and his three younger siblings — Josh, 15, Ellie, 12 and Ryan, 6 — still love to stare into the candles, and they still make their own menorahs — and light all of them.

Every night of Chanukah, the Dubin kitchen turns into a glowing testament to art, family and nostalgia, with as many as 100 menorahs (fewer on the candle-heavy later nights) burning on a foil-covered island and table.

Most of their menorahs are displayed year-round in little cubbies in the living room, which fits well in their house, where every inch is covered in homemade art.

Parents Cindy and Mark host a yearly Chanukah celebration, when friends and family come over to do art projects, eat and, of course, light the candles.

While the guests are content to light and then go eat dinner, the Dubin kids stay in the kitchen, staring into the flames and at the colorful wax stalagmites. For the past six or seven years, they have let the wax drippings build up — Alex has one with a square-foot mass of wax.

Some of the menorahs are favorites: the one crafted from pottery from an Israeli archaeological site, preschool clay ones, the double-glazed ceramics they made with grandma, and any number made from pipes, coffee cans, bolts, metal address numbers, old loaf pans and any other inflammable hardware they can spot.

Grandma Marlene Zimmerman, whose work is exhibited at the Skirball Cultural Center, has one menorah that didn’t make it onto the Dubin family display: Her replica of the Breed Street Shul in Boyle Heights is in President Bill Clinton’s museum in Arkansas. When Clinton was in office, his wife, Hillary, chose Zimmerman’s Breed Street Menorah for the National Treasures Collection, and in 1999 Hillary lit that menorah at the White House Chanukah reception.

The Promise Menorah

Isaac Bialik and Shawna Brynjegard were high school sweethearts and inseparable at UCLA in the early 1990s.

So when Bialik traveled to Israel in 1992 — without Brynjegard — he was thinking about her much of the time. When he spotted a blue-and-purple ceramic-pomegranate menorah made by the Israeli artist Avram Gofer in a shop on Ben-Yehuda Street in Jerusalem, he knew he had to get it for her.

He came home a couple of weeks later, and gave her the menorah on the first night of Chanukah.

“I told her that from now on we would use this every Chanukah together, and that we would never be apart again,” said Bialik, who works on communications for Deloitte, an auditing and financial consulting firm. Bialik didn’t officially propose to Brynjegard for another year, but today Isaac and Shawna Brynjegard-Bialik (or B2) still light that chanukiyah.

Isaac is himself a Judaic artist (www.nicejewishartist.com), and Shawna is a rabbi who performs lifecycle events for those not affiliated with synagogues. By now, their pomegranate menorah has been joined by others in their Santa Clarita-area home. Their daughters, Mira (9), Yael (7) and Aviva (5), have added their own signature pieces and the family has bought a few more menorahs. Each night of Chanukah they light about five menorahs from their ever-growing collection, and while the other menorahs rotate in and out of the ritual, the Brynjegard-Bialiks always light their “Promise Menorah” together.

The Uncle’s Menorah

Sheldon Ginns doesn’t even know the name of the great-great-uncle who gave him his brass menorah more than 60 years ago. He was known simply as The Uncle, the first of the family to come to the United States from Berdichev, Ukraine, around 1900. The Uncle was in his late 90s when he died, and just before then he divvied up his belongings between his closest relatives (his only child had died). The Uncle gave his chanukiyah, which he had held onto through years of poverty, to Ginns’ grandfather, who immediately passed it along to Sheldon, then 8 years old.

The cast-brass menorah, whose edges are worn down form years of polishing, features two lions holding up a heart inscribed with the blessing for the candles, topped by an ornate crown.

Ginns, who grew up in Detroit and now lives in Ann Arbor, Mich., is a retired architect, and he remembers lighting the brass menorah every Chanukah and playing with it as a toy the rest of the year.

The menorah took on a place of honor in his own home, as he and his wife and two sons lit it every Chanukah.

Today, the brass menorah is the only family heirloom Ginns has. His grandfather was the eldest of 12 siblings, and the only one to come to the United States before World War II; no one else survived the Holocaust. His grandmother was the eldest of 10, and also the only survivor in her family. Both looked for their family for years.

When Ginns took the menorah to the Los Angeles-based Lower East Side Restoration Project to have it cleaned and repaired a few years ago, he learned that the menorah dated back to the 18th century and was probably from Poland. He also learned that the reason the menorah had two shamashes — candle cups set higher than the rest — was because it was also used weekly for Shabbat candles, a sign that the family who first owned it was poor and couldn’t afford both a chanukiyah and Shabbat candelabra.

He found out that the chanukiyah was originally an oil lamp and had been converted to hold candles. The Restoration Project restored it to its original state for Ginns.

He lights the menorah every two or three years, and he plans to pass it along to one of his five grandchildren some day to continue the tradition of the Ginns family menorah.

A Blessing by Any Other Name

When Judy Stern (not her real name) was a kid, her mother always made sure to pull out the menorah in December, and she recited the Hebrew blessing. Stern’s father wasn’t Jewish — they had a Christmas tree, too — and aside from that little menorah, not much else Jewish happened in their lives.

Then Stern landed at Hamilton High School near the Pico-Robertson neighborhood, and she made friends with some Jewish kids who invited her to the Jewish Student Union at school, and then to a youth group — where she made a disturbing discovery.

At a Chanukah celebration, the teens recited the blessing over the candles — and it was different from the one her mother had always said.

That evening, Stern realized that her mother, who herself grew up with little Jewish education, had been reciting the only blessing she knew — the Hamotzi, the blessing over bread.

Stern began saying the correct blessing, which she still does to this day. She married a rabbi (ironically, so did her brother), and has four kids. Now, every Chanukah, as they say the brachot over the candles, her mother is there to celebrate with them, and to say, Amen.

Blessings From Bullets

Zane Buzby has restored many menorahs at her Lower East Side Restoration Project, but one of her favorites is what she calls the Palestine Menorah.

The owner, Rivka Greensteen, brought it to Buzby badly in need of repairs and restoration. The dented and dirty silver-plated brass rectangle was shaped like a wall of Jerusalem and engraved with lions and a Jerusalem scene. The candleholders fronting the wall needed care.

Greensteen told Buzby what she knew about the menorah. It had been brought from Russia to America by her grandfather, and was passed down to Greensteen’s father, and then to Greensteen. The family always used this menorah, and always had a family gathering on the fifth night of Chanukah — but they didn’t know why.

When Buzby got the menorah, she immediately recognized it as one from Palestine — pre-state Israel. The candle cups, she told Greensteen, were made from bullet casings. Greensteen put the rest together. Her grandfather’s brother was an early pioneer in Palestine, and must have sent the family the chanukiyah. He was killed in the 1930s in an Arab uprising.

This brother was the fifth son in his family, and it is probably no coincidence, Greensteen guessed, that it is his menorah that brings the family together each year on the fifth night of Chanukah.

As we journey through the month of Elul, it is customary to comment on the weekly Torah portions in light of the upcoming Days of Awe. Parshat Ki Tavo is
read a few weeks before Rosh Hashanah, and its overriding theme is one that we encounter several times during the High Holy Days: blessing vs. curse.

“And all of these blessings shall come upon you, and overtake you, if you listen to the word of God” (Deuteronomy 28:2) Moses says as his introduction to a beautiful description of blessings presented as a reward for following the covenant with God. By way of contrast, Moses also warns: “If you will not listen to the voice of God … all of these curses shall come upon you and overtake you” (Deuteronomy 28:15), and for the next 53 verses Moses describes a list of dark and devastating curses as punishment for abandoning the word of God.

This “blessing vs. curse” motif, so prevalent on the High Holy Days, is uniquely expressed in Sephardic customs. For instance, the Rosh Hashanah liturgy opens the evening service with a poem whose refrain is “May this year and all of its curses come to an end, and may this coming year with all of its blessings come to a good beginning.”

When we come home from Arvit, Sephardim sit around the table and conduct a Rosh Hashanah seder, eating a wide array of symbolic foods whose theme is the rooting out of curse and the aspiration for blessing. We eat pumpkin or gourd, which in Aramaic is called kra (in Hebrew the word for “tear up” is also kra), and in a play on words, we pray that God will “tear up [kra] any evil decrees against us, and let our merits instead be read before God.”

We eat pieces of a fish or lamb’s head, and in a blessing lifted straight from Moses’ blessings in this week’s parasha, we say “May we always be the head, and not the tail” (see Deuteronomy 28:13 — “And God will make you the head, and not the tail”).

One of the most popular expressions of “blessing vs. curse” on the High Holy Days is the image of God seated with two books open before Him: The Book of Life (Blessing) and the Book of Death (Curse). Our liturgy says “Oh God, the Books of Life and Death are opened before You today.”

In the Sephardic tradition, as an expression of alienating ourselves from curses, the custom is that when the hazzan chants this prayer, he changes it to “Oh God, the Good Book of Life is open before You today.”

I guess we assume that God does not have a High Holy Days machzor, or, perhaps it is the outgrowth of another custom, one associated with this week’s parasha. When reading the sixth aliyah, which begins with the blessings and then transitions into the curses, the custom is that when the curses begin, the hazzan lowers his voice and reads the entire lengthy section in a whispering voice. As much as the “Book of Death” or the curses are clear and present in the machzor and in the Torah, it’s unpleasant to chant them in a loud voice.

Throughout Moses’ dark description of curses, the theme of enemies is prevalent. This, too, is part of the curses we wish to obliterate on Rosh Hashanah.

Around the same Sephardic table, the Rosh Hashanah seder also includes dates, leeks and beets. All three foods are eaten accompanied by prayers for the termination of our enemies. The Hebrew word for date is tamar, and before eating the date we say “She-yitamu oyvenu” (May our enemies be consumed; yitamu — consumed — sounding like tamar). The Aramaic term for leeks is karti, and before eating the leeks we say “She-yikartu oyvenu” (May our enemies be cut off; yikartu — cut off — sounding like karti). The Aramaic word for beets is silka, and before eating the beets we say “She-yisalku oyvenu” (May our enemies disappear; yisalku — disappear — sounding like silka). These beautiful (and tasty) customs reflect our innermost desire to begin a year void of some of life’s most brutal curses: strife, conflict and war.

The section describing the blessings continuously repeats the word mitzvot, associating the performance of God’s commandments (mitzvot) with a life of blessing. The Sephardic Rosh Hashanah seder concludes with this theme, as we eat pomegranate seeds and sesame seeds mixed with sugar, both prefaced by saying “May we be full of mitzvot as a pomegranate is full of seeds” or “May our mitzvot be as abundant as sesame seeds and sweet as sugar.”

This fitting end to the seder is a reflection of our deepest yearnings to live a life filled with the blessings that can come when performing God’s mitzvot.

As I read this parasha going into the High Holy Days, I feel blessed with many things, one of which is my rich Sephardic heritage. Even if you’re not Sephardic, you might want to try bringing these blessings into your own home. It’s certainly more diverse than a mere apple dipped in honey.

Daniel Bouskila is rabbi of Sephardic Temple Tifereth Israel.

As the years pass, certain aspects of memory tend to become a bit fuzzy. For
some reason, I can still remember many phone numbers, addresses and even credit
card numbers from decades ago, but other vital and significant facts and experiences have faded.

Yet, no matter how many years I live, I will always remember my bar mitzvah and the Torah portion that became my personal property on that auspicious day. You’ll have to pardon my possessiveness for Parshat Naso, which I have felt since that Shabbat morning at Encino’s Maarev Temple some 47 years ago.

I have noted hundreds of b’nai and b’not mitzvah who have stood proudly beside me on the bimah and declared “welcome to my bar/bat mitzvah, at my synagogue, as we study my Torah portion and my haftarah on my Shabbat.” In a real sense that is exactly what we rabbis, educators, and proud parents want our kids to feel: That the Torah, Shabbat, the whole package, is their intimately personal possession and legacy.

So each year, as I pass this way, by way of Bamidbar and Shavuot, and confront anew the unique concepts of the Book of Numbers, chapters 4:21-7:89, it is much like visiting an old friend. I still remember my entire haftarah, by heart, mostly due to the fact that I hold on to that stuff, not to mention the 78 rpm vinyl disk that was my loyal and dedicated bar mitzvah tutor. And, of course, each annual reunion with Naso reminds me that yet another year has passed, and that there are hopefully more uphill inclines and downhill grades ahead.

What did I think was important about Naso in 1960? I remember not truly understanding the concept of the nazir, the person who made a solemn oath to abstain from worldly indulgences as a means to affirm one’s faith in God. That’s a tough challenge for an early adolescent, even one who claims to be a fountain pen. I did like, however, the fact that the haftarah from Shoftim (Judges) spoke of the birth of the well-known nazir Shimshon, Samson of Delilah fame.

But then, there was the gift. Arguably, one of the most beautiful, most powerful, most utilized and appreciated passages in the entire Bible. And it was in my parasha. The threefold priestly benediction, or Birkat Kohanim, was a natural, the best theme for a bar mitzvah speech I could have ever hoped or prayed for. And though I do not specifically remember, I surely hope that I mentioned these exquisite blessings in my speech.

But like so many other things, it was only in later years, as I passed other milestones and life-cycle events, and embarked on my rabbinical career, that I began to truly appreciate the beauty and depth of this soulful blessing that has adorned myriad significant, sad, but mostly happy moments. A birth, a birthday, a wedding or anniversary, a graduation and countless other sacred moments have been enhanced and sanctified by these words which have sealed the most memorable experiences of our lives.

“Y’vare-ch’cha HaShem v’yish-m’re-cha” (May God bless you and keep you).

The ancient commentators, of course, always intent on extracting every morsel of meaning from the divine text, work hard to uncover the special meanings of every word of this prayer. The ancient midrashic collection, Sifrei, suggests that the two verbs in this first line of the blessing refer to different kinds of divine gifts.

“Yevarechecha” (“May God bless you,” in this interpretation) refers to money, or material gifts. Later commentators elaborate, however, that material wealth without inner peace is no blessing at all. So this blessing is a prayer for material comfort, along with the inner peace to recognize blessing, to know that you have all you need.

“V’yish-m’recha” (May God keep you) refers to divine protection from physical danger. As such, this first part of the blessing asks for basic safety and security, and perhaps, the awareness to recognize the source of all blessing. It might best be rendered, “May God bless you with all you need, and shield you from harm.”

“Ya’er HaShem panav ay-lecha vee-chu-neh-ka” (May God show you favor and be gracious to you).

The first phrase asks God to shed divine light on your face, to make your face radiant with blessing and holiness. The latter verb “vee’chu-neh-ka, comes from the word “chayn,” a word that is probably best translated as “grace.” It is that quality of lived experience when something beautiful shows up for absolutely no apparent reason.

It is when wonderful things happen unexpectedly, astoundingly, that they point to the hand of a higher power. My friend and teacher Rabbi Elliot Dorff expresses the sentiment of this blessing as “God giving us even more than we deserve.”

Finally, God is asked to bless you with peace. Not surprisingly, peace is the climax of the prayer. Without peace, one cannot enjoy any of the other blessings. Without peace, one can not focus upon or recognize the Source of all blessing.

“Yisa HaShem panav ay-lecha, veyasem lecha shalom” (May God face you with love, and give you peace).

For all those sacred moments, memories and hopes, may we continue to remember God’s precious blessings, first conveyed by the priests, then by rabbis, loving parents and many others who all feel privileged to bestow these hopes and promises upon a world that needs them now more than ever.

Mark Hyman is rabbi at Congregation Tifereth Jacob in Manhattan Beach.

Growing up in Morocco, the word “miracle” was a familiar one. I remember how my parents, especially my mother, would bring up the great Moroccan mystics at alltimes of the day — either to pray for a miracle, or to thank them for one.

No miracle was too small. If a plate would break and a child was not hurt, or if a plate would break and a child did get hurt, whatever it was, mothers would immediately call out to one of the sages. Their names were our security blankets. For centuries, they provided a protective, spiritual cocoon for the Jews of Morocco.

These sages were different from the sages of the Bible or the Talmud; they were the sages of the hood. They were gone, but they were not long gone. You knew someone who had kissed their hand. Your father would tell you about a miracle that his own father had experienced with a certain sage. Somewhere in the neighborhood lived the grandson or grandnephew of another great mystic. We would sleep in tents at their burial sites during their yahrzeit. Their pictures were on our walls.

You could almost touch them.

Today, one of the great Moroccan sages, Rabbi Chaim Pinto of the city of Mogador, has a living presence right here in our own hood, on Pico Boulevard, just east of Robertson. It’s at a little shul called the Pinto Center.

It’s not uncommon for a Moroccan synagogue to be named after a well-known sage (a mile north on Fairfax Avenue is another Moroccan shul named after the great Baba Sale). What’s unusual here is that the heart and soul of the Pinto Center is a Pinto himself. He is Rabbi Yaacov Pinto, a direct descendant of the Pinto dynasty.

But I haven’t told you about the miracle yet.

Rabbi Yaacov opened the synagogue in the mid-1980s and built a thriving little community center of prayer and learning, attracting a high-intensity blend of Israeli, French and Persian Jews. Then, seemingly out of the blue, Rabbi Yaacov developed an irresistible urge to return to Israel, where he had been born and raised.

For a shul that revolved around the charisma and leadership of one man, this was a spiritual earthquake. Nevertheless, after much agonizing, Rabbi Yaacov and his family moved in the summer of 2003 to Ashdod, a coastal city north of Tel Aviv with a large Moroccan community, including the rabbi’s mother and several of his siblings.

(I knew Rabbi Yaacov well at the time, and from what I gather, the pressures of fundraising were starting to burn him out; he wanted a better education for his kids, and, like he said to me once, he simply missed the Holy Land).

It didn’t take long for the Pinto shul to unravel. Despite Rabbi Yaacov ‘s best efforts — he came back every six weeks or so and was here for all the holidays and stayed in constant contact with his people in Los Angeles — the Pinto Center was losing its soul. When the Shabbat minyan dwindled from more than 100 to fewer than 20, the end was near.

Rabbi Yaacov prayed to his ancestors, as he often does. That’s when an idea came to him: He would create an intimate “candle room” in the synagogue, where people could come meditate and light candles in the presence of the great Pinto tzadikim, and pray for anything they wished. Well, the word got out and they came from all over to light candles, and I guess somebody must have prayed for the revival of the Pinto shul, because that is precisely what happened next.

The “miracle” took about a year, but slowly the Pinto shul came back to life. It’s not a coincidence that Rabbi Yaacov chose as the ba’al habayit, or master of the house, someone whose family has been connected to the Pinto family for three generations. When this highly enthusiastic man, Maurice Perez, talks about the Pinto family, he sort of transfers the goose bumps over to the listener. His defining family story is when his mother and grandmother got an impromptu blessing on a street in Casablanca from one of the Pinto sages. This story happened 70 years ago, but when you hear him tell it, you’d think it happened yesterday.

Maurice, who joined the shul in 1997 and who currently does the chazanut, decided with Rabbi Yaacov to bring in a teacher (“Rabbi Raffi”) to give Torah classes during the week, and to speak on Friday nights and during the third meal of Shabbat. Maurice formed a small, core group of supporters to cover all expenses, which helped reduce the stress level and bring a general harmony to the shul. They upgraded the interior, with new seating built in Israel, and a new women’s section that features an ethereal, see-through crimson curtain for a mechitzah.

Rabbi Yaacov himself increased his visits to Los Angeles, but he did more than that, too. He made the shul think “bigger than itself,” and got it involved with two projects in the Holy Land.The first was a “supermarket” for the needy, which Rabbi Yaacov started in Ashdod and which has garnered attention for its unique approach: a system based on points, where the poor can keep their dignity while “shopping” for donated food. This project, called C.H.A.I., is a big source of pride for the Pinto shul, as you can see from the pictures on the wall.

The second is a recent decision to have a sister shul in Hebron, where the Patriarchs of the Bible are buried. A few months ago, the Pinto shul donated a Torah scroll, and they are planning regular activities and visits between the shuls.

And then, of course, there’s the dafina.

In Parshat Toldot, we encounter the remarkable event described in Genesis 27, as Yitzhak prepares in blindness to confer an eternal blessing on one of his twin sons.

He wants to extend that blessing to the viscerally evil Esav, who nevertheless always has acted with the utmost respect for his father. Esav has Yitzhak figured out, and Yitzhak really loves him. By contrast, Rivkah is devoted uniquely to the simpler, gentler, less charismatic Yaakov.

Why the dichotomy? We have met Rivkah as a kind, young lady, offering water to slake the thirsts of Avraham’s servant, Eliezer, and his camels. We have heard a midrash that her father, Betuel, attempted to poison Eliezer’s food but died himself when an angel sent by God switched the plates. Later, we have learned of Rivkah’s difficulty in conceiving and of her travails in bearing these particular twins to term.

We further will learn that her brother is worse than her dad. Besides her murderous father, Rivkah’s brother, Lavan, is a prototype for Simon Legree. Lavan will squeeze some 20 years near-slavery out of his nephew and son-in-law, Yaakov, after switching daughters on Yaakov’s wedding night, pulling the beautiful and desired Rachel out and slipping the sad-looking Leah in her stead. Even as Lavan steals from Yaakov for two decades, his own daughters will lament that he has stolen all he could from them, too, treating them as veritable strangers. That’s Rivkah’s bro.

So it emerges that although she is an incredibly sweet soul, Rivkah also grew up in a household with dramatic issues of dysfunctionality at its core. To put it simply, she grew up street-smart.

On the other hand, Yitzhak was intensively protected. Not only were his parents the progenitors and founding patriarch and matriarch of the Jewish people, but they further protected the spiritual elevations of their home by expelling the Yishmaels and Hagars who threatened Yitzhak’s innocence.

The home was sterilized for spirituality, cleansed of any foreign influence. As a further protection, Avraham virtually hand picked Yitzhak’s wife by setting guidelines when he dispatched Eliezer, his servant, to find a suitable match:

1) No one from the surrounding environs, thus no one who will bring along in-laws and other corrupting and disruptive influences;

2) Only someone from Avraham’s own birthland in Charan, assuring both that the wife would be alien to the local environment, thus impeding assimilation into the morally perverse Canaanite culture, and that another set of prospective in-laws would be kept far out of reach.

Thus, Rivkah was raised in a streetwise milieu, while Yitzhak was extremely insulated. So Esav easily played to Yitzhak’s innocence.

By contrast, Rivkah had the tools to read Esav like a roadmap. It then devolved on her to draw on her own street-smarts to save the day, to move her own intensely protected son, Yaakov, to the fore. For this, she drew on a tactic that seems unique to her family — the switcheroo.

Few families practice the kind of prevalent switching that seems to have been endemic in the Betuel-Lavan-Rivkah family. Betuel switches the plates, trying to poison Eliezer. Lavan switches and disguises his daughters on Yaakov’s wedding night. And Rivkah switches and disguises Yaakov for the blessing.

In time, as the family legends grow, Yaakov’s sons one day will deceive him with animal blood they will say is Yosef’s blood on the precious striped coat. And then Yosef will disguise himself from his brothers in the Pharaoh’s palace.

In the end, is the switching of the brothers justified to assure that Yitzhak’s blessing was conferred properly? The commentators are not all of one mind. What if Rivkah had tried reasoning with Yitzhak, even months and years earlier, trying to use her street-smarts to enlighten him, in his protected spiritual innocence, as to Esav’s true character of evil? Perhaps she did try unsuccessfully, and we do not know. Perhaps not.

Yitzhak ultimately is satisfied that he acted correctly in blessing Yaakov; he reiterates Yaakov’s blessing later with full scienter. But consider the price: Esav feels cheated and pledges to murder Yaakov as soon as his father dies.

Rivkah, hearing of the intent, desperately persuades Yitzhak to dispatch Yaakov to Lavan’s house to find a wife. Yaakov ends up exiled for 20 years, victimized incessantly through two decades by an uncle and father-in-law so heinous, that the haggadah recounts that Lavan was worse than Pharaoh.

It is not clear whether Rivkah had an effective alternative to switching and disguising Yaakov to obtain Yitzhak’s eternal blessing. But it does seem that the idea of switching may well have come from the culture of her upbringing, reared in the house of Betuel and Lavan. When in doubt, switch them out.

Sometimes it is useful for each of us to pause, too, and to wonder what practices and shticklach we practice in our homes, in full view of our children, with the attendant consideration of whether these behavioral quirks and anomalies that we sanction as normative and convenient will be passed down through our children and theirs in generations to come.

And in that light, we well might ask: Is it worth it? To deceive? To live by incessant white lies? To constantly criticize? To yell? To measure people by money? To deny fault and refuse ever to apologize? To always be the one who takes and never the one who gives? To be arrogant in one’s self-estimation?

With children watching and emulating — is it worth it?

Rabbi Dov Fischer, a member of the Rabbinical Council of California and Rabbinical Council of America, is adjunct professor of law at Loyola Law School and rabbi of Beth Jacob Congregation of Irvine.

Once upon a time, as God created the world, He decided to make beings in His image. As he generated his own reflection in man and woman, the angels got word of the
project, and were consumed with jealousy.

 
“How unfair!” they cried. “Those humans will have it all. They get to experience life on earth with all the perks: laughter, tears, ice cream, wasabi, softness, scratchiness. And as if that ‘being alive’ stuff weren’t blessing enough, they get immortality as well!” (If God is eternal, so, too, would be anything made in God’s image.)

 
The angels were furious; no being should merit both ice cream and infinity. If heavenly beings were denied earthly experiences, why allow humans celestial ones?

 
So, they plotted against the humans. They decided to hide immortality from them, and assembled to determine how it could be done. One angel suggested, “Let’s hide it far up in the mountains; I hear humans don’t like to shvitz much.
They’ll never climb that high.”

 
Another disagreed: “That won’t work. Those granola hippie Jews God put on the West Coast will surely hike to the top of the mountains and discover it. Better we hide eternality far out in the sea. Most folks won’t go farther than a cruise ship will take them.”

 
Again, others dissented. They realized that any God-like being would eventually access the heights of heaven and the depths of the ocean.

 
Finally, a wise old angel made a brilliant suggestion: “Let us hide the infinite between and within the humans. That will be the last place on earth they would think to look for it.”

 
And so it was.

 
Parashat Nitzavim illustrates the result of the angels’ prank. They succeeded in ensuring that the last place we look for God is right in front of us. The text beseeches the people to take a stand “this day” in testament that the “only God is Eternal,” but acknowledges that we have no idea how to affirm that truth. It speaks to our ignorance of accessing the Infinite, and tries to remedy our delusion. We need not struggle to reach the Divine.

 
Lo bashamiyim hi.

 
“No, it is not in heaven,” God explains. “It is very near to you.”

 
Contact with the Eternal is between us and within us.

 
The parsha speaks to our fantasy that we must search far and suffer long to retrieve this blessing. Were it not, the wording would be different. God would simply state: “Hey guys, check out this groovy commandment I’ve placed right in front of you.”

 
Instead, He addresses our misconception that good things are hard to come by. He elaborates: “[It is not] beyond the sea that you should say: ‘Who will cross the sea for us and bring it over to us that we may do it.”

 
In other words: “No need for drama, difficulty or complication; you don’t need a personal assistant to get this for you. Just open your eyes and see: infinite life is right here, within you.”

 
But we remain blind, instead assuming that if something good happens easily, it is suspicious. We spit three times, even knock on wood, or mumble a “God forbid.” We prepare for disappointment, assume a mistake, because in our estimation no blessing comes effortlessly. Life is hard. Good fortune takes work. Right?

 
Not according to the text.

 
Lo bashamyim hi.

 
Our divine legacy is found within us and between us: “See, I have set before you this day life and blessing or death and curse. Choose life.”

 
Easy. Stick with God for an endlessly good time. You’ll receive immortal prosperity through generations that will flow through you, always have what you need, and live a life of endless possibility.

 
Still, we continue cursing ourselves with dissident struggles — idolizing dramas of the difficult and inaccessible rather than recognizing the abundance we have now. The angels shake their heads as we look everywhere for our hats except our heads, running away from God while He waits within us; She is right here between us.

 
We need only see that the trees surrounding us don’t struggle to grow, they just grow; fish don’t try to swim, they just swim. It is their nature. And it is our nature to exist eternally in God’s image.

 
The angels are tired of laughing at us. They forgive us our good fortune and seek to help us remember. We stand this day, testaments of the infinite Divine presence. There’s nowhere else to look, no place else to be, nothing else as perpetually filled with blessing. We need only accept this present of a moment, this gift of being human.

 
We can stand here and now, present to all the feelings that the angels so covet, in eternal gratitude for having them. We can “Choose life, therefore that [we and our] descendents may live – by loving [our] God; listening to God’s voice.”

 
By adoring our experience, by hearing His voice in one another’s words. We choose life and death: by dying to our attachment to what was and will be.

 
By surrendering to this moment as being nothing but what it is, by appreciating the blessing of our curses. We choose it all, for it is revealed to us as One and the same present from our creator. Eternally within and between us, and we don’t have to shvitz or swim to get it.

 
Rabbi Karen Deitsch will be teaching at the University of Judaism’s continuing education program this fall. You can reach her at karendeitsch@yahoo.com.

As Rosh Hashanah approaches, I am reminded of our trip to Italy a few years ago. We arrived in Milan in the early afternoon and checked into our hotel, planning to attend Rosh Hashanah services that evening at the Sephardic Synagogue.

We were relaxing in our room, and were surprised when the phone rang, because we did not think any one knew where we were. It was Adina Cohen, inviting us to her home for dinner after Rosh Hashanah services.

Cohen was born in Beirut, and her husband, Rabbi Eliezer Cohen, the retired chazan (cantor) of the Sephardic synagogue, is from Cairo. They now live in Milan, and both have strong Sephardic backgrounds. They had heard from their nephew, Moshe Salem, who lives in Los Angeles, that we were traveling in Italy and might be in Milan during Rosh Hashanah.

After services, we met them outside the synagogue and walked to their home, along with several members of their family. We were seated in the living room and met their three daughters, Melitta, Sharon and Elisheza, as well as aunts, uncles, cousins and friends, as they arrived from the synagogue.

The Cohens welcomed their guests, and we were all invited into the dining room, where a large table that almost filled the room was set for the holiday meal. Almost everyone spoke English, but they made sure that we sat close to their daughters, who were educated in Israel and spoke several languages. They made us feel welcome, and explained many of the Sephardic customs with which we were unfamiliar.

The evening began with washing of the hands, and a blessing was recited over the two round, home-baked loaves of challah. The rabbi broke off pieces of the challah, dipped them in salt and sugar and passed a piece to each guest. Adina Cohen explained, that for this special bread, the dough is left to rise only once and takes less time to prepare. The unusual texture, crusty on the outside, yet light and soft inside, comes from kneading the dough to its maximum elasticity, and is quite different from the challah that I make for my family.

Then the ceremonial foods were presented. Each dish was served separately, and a special blessing was said. First a plate of sweet dates, representing peace and beauty, was passed around the table. Then a bowl of fresh pomegranate seeds in rose water was served, the symbol of fertility and worthy deeds.

Next, slices of candied zucca (pumpkin) were eaten, representing a full year of good blessings for the family. Hubbard or butternut squash is the closest to Italian zucca, and may be used instead.

Also, during the New Year celebration, leeks are eaten to bring good luck, and Adina Cohen brought out a large leek frittata that was cut into wedges and served. The final dishes consisted of apple slices cooked in honey to symbolize a sweet year, and bowls of black-eyed peas, expressing hope for the future.

We thought the evening was over, but it was just beginning. The formal dinner started with a whole poached salmon, that was cut and served at the table, topped with homemade mayonnaise. Cohen told us that some of the foods that she serves now, such as fish, were not usually eaten in Lebanon, because they were considered a luxury and almost impossible to find. Since her marriage, many of the dishes she prepares for Rosh Hashanah are her husband’s family recipes from Egypt.

Roasted veal stew was the main course. Cohen mentioned that often lamb is eaten during Rosh Hashanah, but since it was not available, they substituted veal. Crusted rice, first steamed and then fried, was the perfect accompaniment for the veal, and was served along with stewed zucchini and sauteed Swiss chard.

Dessert was simple and refreshing — platters of sliced melon and cactus pears garnished with mint leaves.

Sharing and friendship were at the heart of this wonderful evening, as well as the special role that the foods played. It was a family affair, Cohen a talented cook, baked the challah and prepared the entire dinner herself. Her daughters, were in charge of setting the table and responsible for doing the dishes, and Eliezer Cohen performed the service.

Inspired by the hospitality of the Cohen family in Italy and fascinated by our experience with the Sephardic foods they served for Rosh Hashanah, we have added these dishes to our family holiday dinner.

Symbolic foods are: dates, pomegranate seeds with rose water, candied pumpkin, leeks, apples cooked in honey, black-eyed peas, baked beets.

Rosh Hashanah Challah

2 packages active dry yeast

3/4 cup warm water

2 tablespoons sugar

3 to 4 cups flour

1/4 teaspoon salt

3 eggs

Sesame seeds

Combine yeast with water and pinch of sugar. Set aside.

In a large mixing bowl, combine flour, remaining sugar, salt and two eggs. Add yeast mixture to flour mixture.

Dough will be moist and sticky. Knead about 10 minutes, adding flour or water as needed, until maximum elasticity. Dough should still be moist. Sprinkle dough with flour, cover with plate or towel and let it rise until double, about one hour.

Divide dough in half; place each half on a lightly floured board and lightly knead into two round loaves. Place on a greased baking sheet, leaving space between loaves as they will rise when baking.

Brush with beaten egg and sprinkle with sesame seeds. Bake at 350 F for 20 to 30 minutes or until golden brown and completely baked inside.

Makes two loaves.

Leek Frittata

4 eggs

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

5 medium leeks (about 3/4 pound), white part only, split and washed well

4 tablespoons olive oil

Mix the eggs, salt and pepper with a fork.

Slice the leeks into thin slices. In a 12-inch nonstick skillet, heat olive oil and cook over medium-high heat until tender for six to eight minutes.

Pour the eggs over the leeks, mix and cook over medium-low heat until the eggs are set on the bottom but soft on the surface, three to four minutes.

Put a plate over the frittata and invert the skillet to reverse the frittata onto the plate. Slide the frittata back into the pan to cook the other side. Cook for about five minutes. Slide onto a platter, cut into wedges and serve hot or at room temperature.

Serves eight to 10.

Veal Stew

This stew can be prepared a day ahead and tastes even better after the flavors have a chance to meld.

4 pounds veal shoulder, cut into 2-inch cubes

Salt

Freshly ground black pepper

1/3 cup olive oil

1 onion, diced

2 garlic cloves, minced

2 carrots, peeled and sliced

2 celery stalks, sliced

1 cup dry, white wine

3 cups veal or chicken stock

1 large tomato, chopped

1 tablespoon tomato paste

2 bay leaves

10 whole black peppercorns

4 sprigs fresh parsley

8 sprigs fresh thyme, tarragon or oregano

4 long sprigs fresh marjoram or 1 teaspoon dried marjoram

1 tablespoon dried thyme, tarragon or oregano

10 pearl onions, par boiled for 5 minutes and peeled

Preheat the oven to 350 F.

Season the veal on both sides with salt and pepper. In a large heavy pot or casserole, heat the oil and saute the veal on both sides until brown.

Add the onions and garlic and saute until soft, about five minutes. Add the carrots, celery and saute for five minutes. Add the wine and simmer for two minutes. Add the stock, tomato, tomato paste and bring to a boil.

Combine the bay leaves, peppercorns, parsley and fresh and dried herbs in a piece of cheesecloth; tie with a string and add to the pot. Cover and bake for 2 1/2 hours or until tender.

Toss in the pearl onions. Remove the cheesecloth bag. Serve in soup bowls.

Serves eight to 10.

Judy Zeidler is the author of “The Gourmet Jewish Cook” (Cookbooks, 1988) and “The 30-Minute Kosher Cook” (Morrow, 1999). Her Web site is members.aol.com/jzkitchen.

 

When my wife and I woke up on the day we made aliyah, we talked and decided that we felt good. Natural. Normal. A little excited. A bit eager. Somewhat tired from some late-night, last-minute packing. Above all, we were ready. It was time to go.

The family dressed in T-shirts that we had made for the day. The white shirts were emblazoned in blue with our Hebrew slogan for the trip: “Bashana Hazot,” which in English means “this year.”

Our shirts were inspired from the central motto of the Jewish people: “Next Year in Jerusalem.” Thanks to some terrific support from friends and family, “Next Year” was now.

We had been staying with my parents, who could not have been more encouraging and supportive, for a last precious drop of a week with them. We will next see them in three months, at our new home, in Israel.

At LAX, our porter saw the boxes we were sending, asked a polite question or two and soon knew that we were moving. Before he left us, he said something very formally in Gaelic, which he translated as: “Have a safe trip home.”

Once at the gate, my 4-year-old saw the El Al plane with the giant Jewish star on the tail. He yelled: “Abba, that’s a Israel plane.” Exactly.

As the plane thundered down the runway, my wife looked a question: “Can you believe this is happening?”

I smiled and shook my head from side to side.

Like all flights to Israel, this one lasted a long time, but it did not end until I filled out the Israeli visa entry forms. Under reason for visit, I wrote, “Aliyah.” Under planned departure date, I wrote, “None.”

As we approached Israel, we dropped through a storm. Our 4-year-old saw a rainbow. I held my wife’s hand.

When we crossed over the Tel Aviv coastline, I experienced a flurry of emotions, which were magnified by a sense that this return was final.

I felt a great, humbling appreciation that I was now doing what so many of my ancestors had wished to do for thousands of years. I thought of the millions of Jews who had prayed to God for the existence of a Jewish state in Israel. I was grateful for the sacrifices of the early Zionists, who took sand and mosquitoes and made milk and honey. I considered the multitudes of people, both in America and around the world, who have prayed and worked for Israel’s safety. I recalled all of our friends and family who wished us the absolute best. And, I understood that the thoughts, prayers, dreams and hopes of all those people, going back all those years, were with us, right at that moment, right at that single point in our lives. It was overwhelming.

When our plane landed, my wife and I said the “Shecheyanu” blessing, and thanked God for allowing us to reach this day.

As we entered the terminal, we were met by a smiling official from the Ministry of Interior, who was holding a big blue and white welcome sign, and a volunteer who had previously made aliyah from the United States.

At the airport office of the Ministry of Interior, the kids got candy, flags and pins, and the parents got a new-immigrant identity card called a Teudat Oleh. My cousins brought us not one, but two cakes welcoming us to Israel and drove us to our new home.

As we left the airport, some 26 hours after our day had begun, our boys tried to imitate Hebrew. They laughed as they babbled together: “Cha-cha-cha, cha-moosh, cha-cha-cha.”

They sounded just great.

Nathan D. Wirtschafter lives in Rehovot, Israel.

 

Becoming a grandparent is a very exciting event. Being able to create an heirloom pillowcase out of heirloom pieces for the britim, or covenant ceremonies, of our first grandchildren was an equally humbling and exciting adventure.

Our daughter and son-in-law, Alisha and Ahud Sela, became the proud parents of twin babies, Yael Shira and Gavriel Yair Sela, on May 4, 2004. Knowing beforehand that they were giving birth to twins, a girl and a boy, set the wheels in motion for planning a brit milah, ritual circumcision, and brit mikvah, ritual purification — a relatively new ceremony for a girl, for the two babies. It was planned that the babies would be carried in on pillows for the ceremonies.

While researching what should be written to enhance a bris pillowcase, I found the suggestion of using old family tablecloths for the construction of the pillowcase. I had a tablecloth and napkins given to us by my husband’s grandmother for our wedding, which were now 33 years old. I contacted Ahud’s mother, Rita, and found out she had tablecloths from her grandmother and mother that they had used regularly and were packed up in her attic. Rita sent me a full box of beautifully cross-stitched tablecloths, well worn with loving holes from regular use. I looked at the cloths for two weeks before I had the nerve to make my first cut.

I carefully looked at the cross-stitch designs, imagining what would be the best use of the pieces so lovingly stitched so many years ago. Making the first cut was the hardest, but once that was done everything else fell into place. The back of the pillowcases consists of the edge of a green tablecloth with white fringe and white thread on the cross-stitch design. This was stitched by the baby’s great-great-grandmother, Minnie Aronow (mother of Joel, father of Rita).

Attached to this is a piece from the center of a white cloth with brown cross-stitching created by the baby’s great-grandmother, Yetta Aronow (mother of Rita).The bottom portion of the front of the pillowcase is a white cloth stitched with Shabbat symbols in many colors by Yetta. Rita remembered using this cloth “all the time.” I attached a white napkin from the set given to my husband, David, and myself by the baby’s great-great-grandmother, Anna Robinson (mother of Sandy, mother of David). In one corner of the napkin I attached three white crocheted rosettes that were part of a tablecloth made by great-great-grandmother Anna Robinson and great-aunt Rachel Vorspan (David’s sister). In the other corner is part of an embroidered and crocheted doily made by Bessie Wolfson, first cousin of great-great-grandfather Kopel Kaminsky, who died in the Shoah (father of Sime, my mother).

Before our grandchildren were born, I embroidered in Hebrew, “L’Torah, ul’chupah, ul’ma’asim tovim” on the napkin portions of the pillowcases. This is a prayer for them to study Torah, arrive to the marriage canopy and do good deeds in their future life. I used blue variegated Brazilian embroidery floss for one pillow and a pink, yellow and lavender variegated floss for the other pillow. After the babies were named, I was able to fill in their names in English and Hebrew with their English and Hebrew birth dates. I will be stitching a label inside each case that identifies who made each piece.

Rita and I had the privilege of carrying the babies into the ceremonies on these pillowcases lovingly stitched by the generations that came before them. How delighted these ancestors would be to know that the work of their hands would embrace the future of our families with such love. Our husbands, Nadav and David, held the babies during their britot cradled in the pillowcases.

Alisha and Ahud asked each of the grandparents to share a blessing with their grandchildren. They wanted the blessing to take place under a canopy held up by the baby’s aunts and uncles, Ben Vorspan, Shaina Vorspan and Amitai and Rebecca Sela. I was asked to make this canopy during Passover when Alisha could have had the babies any day (they were born three weeks later). Stitchery was out of the question, so I painted a family tree on a Battenburg lace small round tablecloth. I was able to include some names of great-great-great-great-grandparents, siblings, aunts and uncles. What a holy moment to stand under so many generations and bless our precious jewels.

David and I and Rita and Nadav are truly blessed with these new additions to our beloved families. I can’t wait to add more names to the heirlooms we have created, but for the time being, we’re all very delighted to enjoy the newest blessing.

Bonnie Vorspan is an educator at Kol Tikvah in Woodland Hills.

While on a summer vacation on the East Coast, my family and I visited some spectacular sights in northwestern North Carolina, especially near Ashville. On our way to Ashville, we stopped and asked directions from a gentleman who turned out to be a Methodist minister.

During our conversation he told us that four years ago he received "the calling from above" to leave his 20-year practice of law and join the ministry. Upon hearing this my wife remarked, "That is strange because I have been praying that my husband would receive a calling from above and become a lawyer." Confused, the minister asked, "But what does your husband do that you want him to become a lawyer?" When my wife told him that I am a rabbi, he was astounded and said, "Oh no, your husband is working for the right law, and his boss is honest. Make sure he stays a rabbi."

Whenever I read this week’s Torah portion I think about that blessing from the Methodist minister because Balak also contains blessings from a non-Jew, Balaam, worthy of our consideration. The sages of the Midrash link the name of Balaam with a contemporary heathen philosopher of their time, Oenomaus of Gadera, claiming that Balaam and Oenomaus were the two greatest philosophers that non-Jews ever had.

Oenomaus was a member of the younger school of Cynics who lived in second century C.E., during the latter part of the reign of Hadrian, after the Bar Kochba War. He is mentioned in classical Roman literature as having successfully attacked pagan superstition, and he is identified in rabbinic literature with befriending the great Rabbi Meir. As a result of his close relationship with Rabbi Meir, he became familiar with Judaism, and the Midrash (Eicha Petihtah 2) records that the Romans therefore turned to him, just as Balak turned to Balaam in the Torah, and asked for advice on how to defeat the Jewish people.

We must appreciate that this request was presented to Oenomaus not only after the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E., but also after the Bar Kochba revolt in 132-135 C.E. The Jewish nation was beaten and almost destroyed, yet the Romans wanted to know the secret of our amazing survival.

Oenomaus answered, "Go through their synagogues; if you hear a hum of children’s voices studying Torah, you cannot prevail over them; otherwise you can." Alluding to Isaac’s blessing of Jacob instead of Esau as recorded in Genesis, Oenomaus commented: "As long as the voice of Jacob persists in synagogues and houses of study, the hands are not Esau’s hands; but whenever synagogues and houses of study miss the hum of those voices, Esau will prevail. The hands become Esau’s hands."

The rabbis of the Talmud and Midrash realized that Oenomaus had discovered the secret of Jewish survival. They therefore accorded him the distinction of being the greatest philosopher the non-Jewish world had produced. With Balaam, he had probed and revealed the truth about our faith.

How sorely we need to recognize that truth today when so many Jews believe that the Jewish mission is synonymous with social action. "Save the Whales," they say, but they permit Jonah to drown.

When our community leaders recognize that only commitment to Jewish values will insure Jewish survival, only when children study Torah; only when the voices of both children and adults reverberate in our synagogues, will we once again be worthy of the blessings that both Balaam and Oenomaus bestowed upon us.

Elazar Muskin is rabbi of Young Israel of Century City.

The freeways were quiet and the city seemed peaceful at 4:30 a.m. as I drove to the hospital. I was going to see Thelma before she was taken in for surgery. I thought about the time just over a year ago when Thelma arrived at our house at 3 a.m., tiptoeing in so as not to wake Rachmiel as my husband Jonathan and I slipped out to go to the hospital. My water had broken and our daughter, Kinneret, was on her way.

Thelma has been our children’s nanny for four years, and I always thought of her as a member of our family. Then I considered the words of Leviticus 19:34: The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I the Lord am your God.

It is interesting that the golden rule, "love your neighbor as yourself," is reiterated here with the stranger who resides with you. The verse would make sense without it, however by nestling the positive commandment to love in the center, we realize that it is not enough to act justly toward the stranger who resides with you. It is not enough to pay her on time, treat her with respect. It is not enough to say, "It is as if she is family," or "as one of your citizens." Rather, strive to love.

We were strangers in the land of Egypt, and it turns out, she was, too, for just as God redeemed us with an outstretched hand, God also redeemed her from her own land.

But how can I love her if I don’t know her story?

Although Thelma’s English is good, I hired a translator and invited her to my office so that I may learn her whole story, the stranger who resides with me.

Thelma spoke of the illness of her 10-month-old son, Carlos, the way he looked at her when he was placed in isolation at the hospital, his angelic face, longing for her to comfort him. He died before she ever held him again. I thought about the day when my son was 10 months old and closed a drawer on his finger. He cried so hard he passed out and his lips turned blue. I now understood better the layered terror that Thelma experienced in reviving him.

When she spoke of the reasons she ran from Guatemala and the journey to full citizenship in America, I felt as if I was hearing the Exodus firsthand.

She told me of the Jewish families she worked with: the family for whom she worked 12 hours a day, who, when her own shoes wore out, bought her a new pair and deducted it from her pay. The family with whom she lived that would lock the house so she could not come "home" and withheld her pay while they enjoyed vacations. And she was never invited to eat with the family.

I filled pages and pages of notes listening to her story.

You shall love the stranger as yourself.

Thelma was in her hospital bed when I arrived. She was in pain and had been diagnosed with ampullary cancer — cancer of the bile duct. I sat on the edge of her bed.

She took my hands and said she felt in her heart she was Jewish. She had questions about Judaism and months ago I had bought her a basic Judaism book in Spanish, as well as a stack to leave in our synagogue lobby where many nannies wait while their charges are in class.

Just then her cell phone rang, and I was shocked to hear "Hava Nagila" as her ring tone.

She said she did not want to go into surgery without a blessing from me. I lay my hands on her head and recited "Misheberach." She opened her eyes and there were tears in them.

"I had a vision of Jerusalem," she said. "Everyone was wearing white, praying in a great courtyard."

I felt as if I had been blessed by her.

Thelma started chemotherapy last week. Someone said to me, "You should keep her away from your children to protect them from being sad while she is sick."

I couldn’t even understand the terrible advice. "The stranger who resides with you … you shall love [her] as yourself."

Think of the people who "reside with you," who work with you, for you, beside you. Ask them for their stories, and consider not only treating the stranger "as citizens," but how our love can indeed make them strangers no longer.

Recently, I came across a story about a man who made the "unforgivable" mistake of missing his wife’s birthday. When the wife expressed her anger, the quick-witted husband responded, "Sweetheart, how do you expect me to remember your birthday when you never look any older?"

If only that were true, and we could find the secret elixir for everlasting youth, we would all be happier. Although some French winemakers would like us to believe that imbibing one glass of French wine each day will do the trick, most of us realize that, considering the alternative, aging is a blessing.

And yet we must wonder, how does one make the best with the time we are given on earth? This question is as old as man himself, and the Torah did not shy away from offering us some essential advice. Moses, on his last day on this earth, summed it up for us when he declared, "Therefore choose life that you may live, you and your seed" (Deuteronomy 30:19).

The late 13th century biblical commentator, the Baal HaTurim, notes that the Hebrew word used in this verse for life wasn’t the usual "L’chaim," but "B’chaim." He suggests that the reason "B’chaim" was chosen is because its numerical value equals 70, and the number 70 teaches us three lessons about life that are important to remember:

First he notes, the normal life span of man is 70, as Moses taught us in his famous Psalm, "The days of our years are 70, and if with strength, 80 years" (Psalm 90:8). Moses wanted us to realize first and foremost that we must use every minute of the life that we are given to its fullest. Seventy years passes way too fast for one to ever be able to say, "I have time to kill." No ethical society can tolerate murder, and likewise no one should murder time, for the ultimate gift is time itself.

Second, 70 is also associated with another concept that is basic to Jewish life. Our sages tell us that there are "70 ways to interpret the Torah."

Simply put, that means that there is a lifetime of study awaiting each Jew. I recall how the late great talmudic scholar and philosopher, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, reminded us that if we wished to remain young we should never stop learning. On one occasion, Rabbi Soloveitchik, reflecting on his many years of teaching, explained: "My classroom is crowded with boys who, as far as age is concerned, could be my grandchildren. When I enter the classroom, I am filled with despair and pessimism. I always ask myself: Can there be a dialogue between an old teacher and young students, between a rebbe in his Indian summer and boys enjoying the spring of their lives? I start the class without knowing what the conclusion will be. Let me tell you, at the conclusion of the class, which can sometimes last three or even four hours, I emerge young. Younger than my pupils. They are tired and exhausted. I feel happy. I have defeated age. I feel young and rejuvenated" (Rakeffet-Rothkoff, Aaron, The Rav, Vol. 2, pp. 186-189).

Finally, the Baal HaTurim notes that "B’chaim" equals the numerical value for the Hebrew word sod (mystery). Life is worth living because it offers the excitement of uncovering the mystery of our very existence. There is so much to discover, so much to learn, that there is no time waste.

As we prepare to end one year and begin another, the three-fold lesson of the word, "B’chaim," is worthy of our notice. Maybe that is why this Torah reading is always right before Rosh Hashanah, reminding us to choose wisely.

Elazar Muskin is rabbi of Young Israel of Century City.

If you were told that you had only a matter of days to live what would you do?

Write out a will? Eat your favorite meal? Try to repair troubled relationships? In our Torah portion this Shabbat, Jacob knows he is dying. Faced with this knowledge, there is only one thing he wants to do: bless those he loves.

We learn early on just how important blessings are to Jacob. When we first meet up with Jacob, he buys the birthright from his brother, Esau, with a pot of lentils. Later, Jacob disguises himself as Esau in order to deceive his father, Isaac, and receive the blessing he has so longed for. Given the lengths that Jacob was willing to go to in order to gain his blessing, it makes perfect sense that his final act should be to bestow blessings. How could Jacob possibly leave this world without passing along the blessing he had worked so hard to acquire?

Why was Jacob so obsessed with blessings? I think he understood better than most the power of a blessing. He believed that through a blessing, one could transmit not only love, but status, strength, leadership, reassurance, hope and even divine favor.

We are the Children of Israel, the descendants of Jacob. We too can bestow blessings on the world and on one another.

When was the last time you blessed someone? Today, most people feel uncomfortable blessing others. They assume that blessings are formulas that rabbis are supposed to offer. But they are mistaken. Anyone can offer a blessing.

Through a blessing you can turn a mundane experience into a holy encounter. When a loved one is ill, you can visit and bring flowers or stand before that same loved one, place your hands on his or her head and offer a blessing for healing. Imagine the strength and comfort such a blessing would convey.

Below, I’ve included four blessings. I have written for healing, for our children, for a new grandchild and even one for our parents. Please feel free to use them, alter them or, better yet, create your own.

A Blessing for Healing

May God heal you, body and soul.

May your pain cease,

May your strength increase,

May your fears be released,

May blessings, love, and joy surround you.

Amen.

A Blessing for a Parent to Say to a Child

I wrote the following blessing to accompany the priestly blessing that parents bestow upon their children each Shabbat. If you are a parent, don’t be timid. Approach your child and say, "I’d like to bless you."

May all the gifts hidden inside you find

their way into the world,

May all the kindness of your thoughts be expressed in your deeds,

May all your learning lead to wisdom,

May all your efforts lead to success,

May all the love in your heart be returned to you,

May God bless your body with health and your soul with joy,

May God watch over you night and day and protect you from harm,

May all your prayers be answered.

Amen.

A Grandparent’s Blessing for a New Grandchild

Gift of God, precious child, miracle, my little one. Lay your head on my shoulder. It seems that it was yesterday that I held your mother in my arms just this way. You are a sweet blessing to me, a tiny messenger of joy. Welcome to this magnificent life.

May God grace you with all things that are good and shield you from all harm.

May the bonds of our family be your strength. May our love be your comfort.

May our faith sustain you. May God be with you, now and always. Amen.

A Blessing for Children to Say to Their Parents

At my mother’s 75th birthday celebration, she asked me to bless her. When I stood up, placed my hands on my mother’s head and blessed her, I cannot describe the feelings that passed between us. All I can say is, bless your parents. You won’t regret it. You will never forget it.

You gave me my life. You give me your wisdom, your guidance, your concern, your love. You are my mentor, my protector, my moral compass, my comfort. There are no words to express my gratitude for all the blessings you have given me. Still, I tell you, thank you.

May God bless you as you have blessed me, with life, with health, with joy, and with love. Amen.

Now that I’ve encouraged you to go out into the world and bless others, I’d like to conclude by blessing you.

May God be with you, may health and strength sustain you. May nothing harm you, may wisdom and kindness enrich you. May you be a blessing to this world and may blessings surround you now and always. Amen.

Everybody’s good at something. The trick is to discover what it is. In Parshat Vayechi, Jacob blesses each of his 12 sons. They each receive a blessing that is appropriate to their skills. Judah is blessed with leadership, for from him will be born kings. Benjamin is told he is a wolf, because his descendants will be mighty warriors. Asher is blessed with richness — his descendants will grow the best olive trees.

Think about what you’re good at. Now think about a kid in your class who is good at something else. Your challenge is to find out what it is: paper airplanes? miniature golf? crossword puzzles? And then you and your classmate can get together and help each other learn a new skill.

Can you think of someone who used to live in your neighborhood or went to your school but moved away? How did you feel when they moved? Was the person who left someone who did nice things for people? Was he or she helpful?

Inventive? Was it fun to play with that person? Then you probably miss him or her a little bit. Now think: What if you moved away? What kind of impression would you leave behind? Would people miss you?

Answer that question to yourself — and be honest. It might be time to say: “I should be a little more helpful” or “Yeah, I’m a good kid.”

Riddle Me This!
Here’s a Riddle.
E-mail the answer

Charan is the name of the town that
Abraham left and Jacob returns to in order to find a wife. Mount Ararat is where Noah’s Ark landed. In which country can we find both of these biblical sites?

Hint: The answer has something to do with an upcoming holiday.

The Jewish
Joke Box

Moishe was
walking in the woods.
Suddenly, a bear appeared
and chased him. When the
bear cornered him, Moishe
thought his life is over until he
saw the bear take out a yarmulke
and put it on his head.
“Oh, good,” he thought,
“he’s a Jewish bear.
He won’t eat me.”
Then the bear said:
“Hamotzi lechem min ha’aretz.”
(The blessing before eating a meal.)

Submitted by:
Camille Fagan, 10
Oak Park

It began with the first two human born into this world, the world’s first brothers.

In the course of time, Cain brought an offering to the Lord from the fruit of the soil. Abel, for his part, brought the choicest of the firstlings of his flock. The Lord paid heed to Abel and his offering, but to Cain and his offering He paid no heed. Cain was much distressed and his face fell (Genesis 4:3-5).

How did Cain know? The offerings are placed upon the altar. As each is set aflame, the smoke rises. How can one possibly ascertain that God accepts one and rejects the other? No, here the Torah tells us something deeper — not how it really was, but how it appeared to Cain, the world’s first aggrieved brother. In my fantasy, Cain crosses the field to his brother. "Say Abel, show me how you did that." But alas, when they were in the field, Cain set upon his brother, Abel, and killed him (Genesis 4:8). And so it began.

Sigmund Freud proposed that the dynamic of human personality is shaped in the Oedipal complex — the young boy’s adoration of his mother leading to conflict and ultimate identification with his father. The Torah, as well, locates the primal human drama within the family, but in a different relationship — in the struggle among brothers. The Torah itself is structured around a set of tense brother stories: Cain and Abel; Noah’s sons; Abraham and his brother’s son, Lot; Ishmael and Isaac; Jacob and Esau; Joseph and his brothers; Moses and Aaron. They struggle for position, power, priority, but most of all, they struggle for their father’s blessing.

When Isaac was old and his eyes were too dim to see, he called his older son, Esau, and said to him, "My son."

Esau answered, "Here I am."

And Issac said, "I am old now, and I do not know how soon I may die. Take your gear, your quiver and bow, and go out into the open and hunt me some game. Then prepare a dish for me such as I like, and bring it to me to eat, so that I may give you my innermost blessing before I die" (Genesis 27:1-2).

Esau, faithful but thick, is supplanted by his trickster brother, Jacob, who hides his smooth skin beneath his smooth words to seduce the father into granting him the family blessing. Esau returns with the hard-won venison and prepares his father’s dish, only to discover that his blessing has been taken.

When Esau heard his father’s words, he burst into wild and bitter sobbing and said to his father, "Bless me, too, Father!"

But Issac answered, "Your brother came with guile and took away your blessing."

And Esau said to his father, "Have you but one blessing, Father? Bless me too, Father!" And Esau wept aloud (Genesis 27:34-35, 38).

For the first time, we can feel sympathy for him. Crude, violent, impulsive, there is nevertheless something genuine and good in Esau’s ferocious loyalty to his father. And something moving in his vulnerability. So into his mouth is placed the Bible’s harshest critique of its own monotheism: Have you but one blessing, Father? Who told Father Isaac there was only one blessing to split between two sons? Must one God imply only one blessing, only one birthright, only one way, only one truth? Does God accept only one brother’s offering and reject the other’s? Is there room for only one brother in this land, in this world? If so, teaches the Torah, we are doomed to reiterate an endless cycle of fratricide, generation after generation.

The Messiah will not arrive, according to an old tradition, until Esau’s tears are exhausted. Redemption comes when Father Isaac and all his descendants find in the infinite heart of God a fitting blessing for Esau — a place for the other brother. Redemption comes when the ehad (oneness) of monotheism is read as the most inclusive of theologies. Only then will we fulfill the prayer of the Psalmist, "How good and how pleasant it is that brothers dwell together" (Psalms 133:1).

Not long ago, a friend of mine called me and said, "Naomi, I need your help.

I want you to teach me how to pray to God." She told me whenever she goes to shul, she tries to sing along, but she feels nothing. Just words. She said she’s been trying to meditate in a quiet spot, hoping for some kind of communication with God, but she feels nothing. Just silence. My friend’s problem is a familiar one. So many of us sit in shul on Yom Kippur feeling lost or bored. We want to pray, but we don’t know how.

The Shabbat that falls between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur is called Shabbat Shuva, because on it we read the haftorah that begins with the moving words of the prophet Hosea: "Shuva Yisrael" — "Return, Israel, to the Lord your God." But returning to God is no simple matter. How can we return to God when we don’t know how to reach God? Like my friend, so many of us long to feel God’s presence in our lives, but we feel cutoff from God. We don’t know where to find God.

In our Haftorah, Hosea offers us a path to God. The prophet says, "Take words with you and come back to God." I told my friend, "This problem you’re having, tell it to God, and you’ll be praying." There are many forms of prayer we can learn, but the one we can all start with is the prayer of our souls. We don’t have to introduce ourselves to God; God already knows us. Notice that Hosea doesn’t say, "Come to God." He says, "Come back to God." We aren’t strangers to God. We don’t need to begin a relationship with God. God is already in a relationship with us, God already loves us. Every day, God is waiting for us, calling out to us: "Return to Me." We don’t have to say anything profound; we don’t have to sound smart. God doesn’t care. We don’t have to be sitting quietly in a state of prayerful devotion; whenever we speak, God listens.

Many people tell me that they feel overwhelmed by the depiction of God on Yom Kippur. They are frightened to approach a mighty King on a throne who sits in judgment over us, who knows all our misdeeds and decides who shall live and who shall die. But our haftorah this Shabbat offers a much more intimate picture of God. God is the One searching for us. God is lonely without us.

When we return to God, our lives start to open up. Answers start to appear. We begin seeing things we never noticed before. Days that used to feel empty are suddenly infused with meaning. Anxiety gives way to calm, despair gives way to hope, fear gives way to faith, frustration gives way to peace, sadness gives way to joy. Most of all, through prayer our indifference gives way to action.

Prayer reminds us that we are connected through God to one another, to all those longing for our help. Our souls are tied to the souls of all people. Our souls are tied to the souls of all those who have come before us. We are not alone. We are not cut off. We have not been forgotten: God is with us. God has filled us with enormous potential. But God has given us only limited days. God is praying for us, hoping we will learn how to take care of one another. The world is waiting for us to bless it.

Each of us has a prayer in our hearts, a prayer of singular importance. Chances are, we will find it only by opening our hearts and speaking it directly to God. This Yom Kippur, as you are sitting in shul, when the moment is right, close your eyes. Take a deep breath in and, as you breathe out, relax. Without censoring or editing, look inside yourself. Look deep down inside. Find the prayer of your soul. Find it and speak it to God. Tell God your pain, your hope, your joy. Share your deepest longing. Express your anger. Ask for God’s help. Tell God your secret. Thank God for your blessings. Shout, sing, whisper, talk to God. And listen closely for a reply.

May you receive an answer that will bring you joy and peace. May God be with you, may health and strength sustain you, may nothing harm you, may wisdom and kindness enrich you, may you be a blessing to this world, and may blessings surround you now and always.

May this be a sweet year filled with health, joy, blessings and peace. Amen.

A young friend of mine switched career paths, giving up on an industry that she did not find fulfilling. She is now working in a field that she finds challenging, has potential for growth and gives her opportunities to contribute in ways that are important to her. This week she received a call from someone begging her to return to her previous career, offering to even double her salary. Obviously, this was an extremely tempting offer, one that is not only lucrative, but that validates her worth and talents in the field. Yet, she declined the offer. She made a choice to stay in a career that brings fulfillment to her life.

She is choosing to live a life of blessing. This blessing is precisely the kind we are encouraged to seek in this week’s Torah Portion. As Moses continues his farewell charge to the people, he calls out, "See, this day I set before you blessing and curse." Moses informs us that we each have the ability to choose living a life of blessing.

To actively make this choice, the verse tells us we must see what is set before us. It is often a tremendous challenge to see what is in front of us, because our complex reality is not solely physical. Often we must see the world and our place in it through other eyes, through the eyes of knowing, feeling and understanding. Bitterness, doubt, pain can blur our vision. Then, we must see with our heart, intuition, insight and intellect to comprehend what is right for us.

We have the power to choose blessing or curse. Choosing a life of blessing means using the circumstances God has placed before us. If we use the particulars of our situation to fulfill our potential, then we choose blessing. If we squander them and do not find the path to attainment of the unique way we can touch the world, then we feel discontent. We search, we wander, we cannot "find ourselves." This is the curse.

A Midrash, a rabbinic legend, describes life as a crossroads. It says there are two roads to walk down, the road of blessing or the road of curse. One road begins straight and ends with curves, the other begins with curves and obstacles, yet ends straight. The straight road often seems easy and more direct, but yet can have obstacles, and even lead us astray. The curved road symbolizes the difficulties and trials and errors we must endure before we can set ourselves on a straight path. Often, only after we have acquired insight and understanding can we utilize our special gifts.

The world, with its challenges and blessings, is given to all of us. Yet, how we live in and respond to it is uniquely up to us. God invites us in to be ourselves, to avail ourselves of all the conditions of life, the wondrous along with the hardships and the challenges. Yitzchak Luria, the 16th-century kabbalist, teaches that we are each here to do a specific task. No one else can make a difference, do a job, approach a kindness or perform a mitzvah, exactly the way we can.

The Torah says, "See, this day I set before you blessing and curse." It urges us to use "this day," today; to respond to the uplifting and to the oppressive. Every day the possibilities of life are renewed.

A man I know is on kidney dialysis. His entire lifestyle has been altered. Three times a week he must spend most of the day hooked up to a machine. He has had to reduce his business, his social life, his traveling. Yet instead of bitterness, he maintains an outlook on life that is positive, vital and filled with contributions to others. As he sits in the clinic, he shares entertaining anecdotes with the healthcare workers and the other patients. He continues to run his business on a limited basis, he maintains his leadership role in his synagogue and is devoted to family and friends.

As a step toward helping others see and understand their world, he takes time to counsel others suffering from kidney failure about living with the realities of dialysis. Just like my young friend who made a deliberate choice of a fulfilling career, in his own way, every day, he is choosing the path of blessing.

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Rabbi Mimi Weisel is assistant dean of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at the University of Judaism.

The other day, I got a sample of Pampers in the mail. It doesn't happen very often now, fortunately. For a while there, almost every day brought free diapers, coupons for baby food, baby lotion, baby photographs. I passed them on to my sister, who has a year-old son, and told myself that it's not their fault. How could they know, after all? It's just that I'm on some kind of list — a “new mothers” list, probably through my doctor's office — and so they keep sending me these products, products I'd rather not think about just now.

It happens to people all the time. That's one of the things you learn when it happens to you. Suddenly, you're part of a new sisterhood, a new brotherhood — people who have gone through a miscarriage, lost a baby, suffered a stillbirth. You had no idea how many people around you had such an experience, because most of them never said a word. Only now, when it happens to you, do they let you in on their secret.

They tell you about their losses because they want you to know they understand. They don't think you're ridiculous for mourning over something that wasn't even really a baby — just a coiled-up ball of life, maybe half an inch long. Except that, for you, of course, it was a baby, and it belonged to you, and you loved it. They understand the crushing sense of failure, and the guilt, and the questions that you know are irrational and pointless but you ask yourself anyway: Did I do something wrong? Could I have prevented this if I'd taken better care of myself, stayed off my feet, cut down on stress?

Later, when the pain eases and you stop tormenting yourself with questions, you find yourself dwelling on one simple idea: how many people have walked this path before me. How very common pregnancy loss is, and what a miracle it is to carry a healthy baby to term.

“Women don't need to lay tefillin,” a traditional Jew once said to me. “Your womb is your tefillin. Your power to nurture new life within your body is what connects you to God.”

If we come to this week's portion expecting a lyrical celebration of women's special bond with the Creator through the miracle of childbirth, we may be sorely disappointed. Parashat Tazria spells out all that the Torah has to say about rituals for the new mother — eight verses in all. For more than a month, she must undergo “blood purification,” forbidden to touch any sacred object or enter the holy sanctuary. After her period of separation, the woman brings two sacrifices — a burnt offering and a sin offering — and she is then reintegrated into the community (Leviticus 12:1-8).

Nothing of the joy and wonder of childbirth seems to rise up from this brief legal passage; it speaks instead of ritual impurity, isolation, purgation. But under the dry, compressed language courses a river of emotion. The emergence of a new human being is awesome, tremendous — a mysterious, soul-shattering event. Surrounded by blood taboos whose precise meaning we can no longer decode, childbirth in the Torah is fraught with danger, electric with the energy of life and death, touched by the sacred. It changes a new mother permanently — separates her from who she was, and from all those around her. For a while, she withdraws, dazed and disoriented, from normal life; her world consists of nothing but the baby. Only gradually does she return to herself and her community. Spiritual, psychological and cultic processes merge in the Torah's ritual of reintegration.

At the tail end of the 20th century, human reproduction has become “domesticated” — subject to scientific understanding and manipulation. But for the Torah, birth retains its primal strangeness and elemental power; it is outside the human domain; it belongs to the Holy One.

We are taught: “One must offer a blessing over the bad just as one offers a blessing over what is good” (Mishna Berachot 9:5). I'm still wondering what blessing can come from the loss of a baby. But maybe pain, as well as joy, can awaken us to the miracle of birth. Maybe if we learn how often things go wrong with the intricate, elegant process by which life comes into the world, we'll cherish, all the more, those times when everything goes blessedly, stupendously right.

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Rabbi Janet R. Marder is director of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, Pacific Southwest Council.

Pity Esau. One moment of weakness, one moment ofimpulse, and his birthright is gone. He goes out to fulfill hisfather’s dying wish for a savory meal of game, and while he’s outhunting, his mother and brother conspire and rob him of his blessing.Returning to his father with the feast, expecting at last to gain hisdue position as head of the clan, he is met with his father’s emptyexcuses. And so Esau cries: “Have you but one blessing, Father? Blessme too, Father!” And Esau wept aloud (Genesis 27:38). Tears ofbetrayal, of pain, of rage, of broken dreams.

Two brothers. One blessing. But who told FatherIsaac that he had but one blessing to bestow upon his sons? Who toldhim that blessings must be hierarchical — setting one brother overthe other, declaring one the victor and the other a loser? Why can’the see where this leads? Has he no sense of the bitterness andturmoil that will come of this? Is his spiritual imagination so smallthat he cannot find a unique blessing for each of his sons? Is thisthe blindness that afflicts him?

Two brothers, one blessing. This is the darkunderside of Genesis. Cain murders Abel. Abraham must separate fromhis brother’s son, Lot, because there can be no peace between them.Ishmael is cast out of the family to make room for Isaac. Jacobdeceives his blind father and steals his brother Esau’s blessing.Joseph’s brothers sell him into Egyptian slavery. Beneath theenchanting tales of Genesis, the charming Bible stories we love toread to our children, lies this legacy of hatred, rage, estrangement,murder and pain.

More than the stories of our dysfunctional family,Genesis is an alarm — a plea, a warning — against the humanpropensity to think in binary terms: Us/Them. Our People/ThosePeople. The Good Brother/The Evil Brother. The Children of Light/TheChildren of Darkness. This calculation always yields the sameproduct: The Other. Who is The Other? We call him by many names, buthe is always the same. Cast out for his unrighteousness. Undeservingof blessing. Evil. Dark. Alien. Excluded. Estranged.

Why do we human beings need The Other? Whatemptiness within our soul does it fulfill? What comfort does it giveus to identify, to isolate, to castigate, to scorn The Other?Politicians love him. Demagogues thrive on him, for there is noeasier way to the heart of a people than through our fear, ourdisgust, our rejection of The Other. Just listen to theirrhetoric.

But remember Genesis. Who is The Other? He is ourbrother. Ignore him and watch as his rage consumes everything we holddear. We will never have peace, and we will never be whole until wemeet him and make peace with him. Be careful. His rage is potent. Butif we have the courage to confront him, to meet and embrace him, wewill find him ready to receive us.

“Looking up, Jacob saw Esau coming, accompanied by400 men. He divided the children among Leah, Rachel and the twomaids, putting the maids and their children first, Leah and herchildren next, and Rachel and Joseph last. He himself went on aheadand bowed low to the ground seven times until he was near hisbrother. Esau ran to greet him. He embraced him, falling on his neck,he kissed him, and they wept (Genesis 33:1-4).

Again, Esau weeps. But this time, different tears.For the years consumed and wasted in rage, hatred, bitterness andfear. For the brokenness endured until each brother realized that hecould have his own, unique blessing. And for the generations of theirchildren who will yet live by dividing — believing in theirblindness that there is only one blessing. For those who have yet tolearn the ultimate lesson of Genesis.

Ed Feinstein is rabbi at Valley Beth Shalom inEncino.

All rights reserved by author.

Joseph is drawn from the pit.

Photo from “The Jewish People: A PictorialHistory.”

Read a past week’s torah portion!

ParashatVa-Yeze (Genesis 28:10-32:3)

Shabbat Thanksgiving

Parashat Chaye Sarah (Genesis23:1-25:18)

Parashat Va-Yera(Genesis 18:1-22:24)

Parashat LechLecha (Genesis 12:1-17:27)

ParashatNoah (Genesis 6:9-11:32)

Bereshit,Genesis 1:1-6:8