Yeladim
Abby Gilad
January 6, 2005
Happy New Year! It is back to school and back to lessons. In this week\’s parshah, Pharaoh learns a few lessons, too – seven, to be exact.
Category
israelites
Living Torah
Rabbi Debra Orenstein
December 30, 2004
Imagine yourself forgotten, without anyone to protect you. Ruling powers are oppressing you and killing your children. The purported
\”reason\” is economic, but a deep hatred based on mere difference underlies this attempted genocide. Helpless, you cry out. Who, in heaven and on earth, will hear your cries and move to save you? Awaiting relief, what do you do?
Now, imagine that you are privileged — a son or daughter of the ruling class. Your life is comfortable, even luxurious. You witness the sharp contrast between your situation and the suffering of the underclass. They are slated to die, and your cooperation, whether tacit or overt, will help make it happen. What do you do?
Imagining Caleb
Rabbi Zoë Klein
July 8, 2004
Our Torah portion devotes more than 60 verses to the census of the Israelites.
Righteous Indignation
Rabbi Debra Orenstein
July 17, 2003
Last week\’s Torah portion ended with a dramatic cliffhanger. A plague was in progress, punishing the Israelites for worshipping the false gods. Despite earlier prohibitions and the snare of idolatry, an Israelite man openly brought a Midianite woman into the camp. (Commentators infer that the two had sex.) While others wept, Pinchas pierced the couple with a spear, and the plague was suddenly halted. Pinchas risked both his life and the priesthood. The families could have sought revenge, and priests who kill are normally ineligible for service.
‘Shattered Dreams’ 10 Years After Oslo
Ethan Bronner
May 15, 2003
\”Shattered Dreams: The Failure of the Peace Process in the Middle East, 1995-2002,\” by Charles Enderlin (Other Press, 2003).
I once asked King Hussein of Jordan whether he considered Zionism legitimate. Did he accept that there was any historical basis to the Jews\’ claim to a portion of Palestine as their homeland? He looked at me as if I were from Mars and ducked the question. Later, he told a Jordanian colleague that only a Jew could have posed such a strange question. Perhaps by the time of his death in 1999 he had softened his view. But his reaction still exemplifies that of the vast majority of Arabs today.
Keys to the ‘Kingdom’
Tom Tugend
May 8, 2003
"The ideals that form the moral compass of Western civilization, the belief that every human being has value, the belief that no one is above the law, the belief that how each of us treats our fellow human beings matters — these were all the gifts of the Jews."
Wonderful
Abby Gilad
March 6, 2003
>This is what happens in this week\’s parsha. In Parshat Pekuday, Moses gives the Israelites an accounting of how much gold, silver and copper
was contributed to build the mishkan (the Tabernacle that held the Ten Commandments).
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