When a book on bar mitzvah opens with a poem by Rudyard Kipling and a quote from French ethical philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, it\’s clearly not your usual bar mitzvah book, of which there are many.
Wherein lies the power of the Judah personality? Is this the same Judah who initiates the sale of his brother and whose conduct in the Tamar episode raises troubling questions? Equally remarkable is the haunting silence of Judah\’s siblings. Why is it Judah alone who stands tall in the face of the hostile viceroy who wants to seize Benjamin? Are they not all certain of the consequent early demise of their father Jacob?
There were always Jews in punk, even before there was punk.
\”It really begins with Lenny Bruce,\” says Steven Beeber, whose new book \”The Heebie Jeebies at CBGBs: A Secret History of Jewish Punk,\” will be published next year by A Capella Books. \”Bruce sort of epitomizes the attitude, the whole smart-ass, clever truth-telling.\”
In fact, the punk attitude is also a Jewish attitude that begins with the midrash, in which Abram smashes all but one of his father\’s household idols and blames the sole survivor for the wreckage.
I understand tikkun olam, the repairing and healing of our world, as the central calling of our people. All of the prayer, teaching, outreach, pastoral work and congregational activities that I help facilitate lead me back to the notion that they are somehow helping to add the necessary energy into our global cosmos, which can facilitate the advent of a new and better time for all people. And I know that each of us is working, in our own way, to help better the world.
The midrash in the Yalkut Shimoni uses this insight to provide a beautiful homily. The midrash points out that the one who flees from positions of honor and authority, achieves honor and authority.
David Klinghoffer\’s biography of the patriarch Abraham rides on a new wave of interest in the Bible, and a growing sense of the Abrahamic heritage that Christians, Jews and Muslims share.
The fact that Tisha B\’Av falls in the summer is not just a stroke of bad luck. God deliberately destroyed the Temple in the summer. Summer, when the world is outside their closed homes and offices, taking vacations, having fun.
God spoke to me once when I was 12 years old. Although it happened years ago, I remember it as clearly as if it were today. Revelation is a tricky thing. I am reminded of the Midrash that when God gave the commandments at Mt. Sinai, God speaks to the Children of Israel in a divine voice so powerful they are too terrified to hear anything beyond the very first word of the first commandment. Since even that was too much to bear, God arranged it so they only heard the first letter of the first word. The first word is Anohi (\”I am\”), and the first letter is an alef, which is silent. So the rabbis teach us that what the Jewish people heard when God spoke was the Divine Silence of the mitzvot. Within that Divine Silence, each woman and man experienced her or his own unique divine revelation.
Before God created the human being, according to alegend of the Midrash, He consulted the angels of heaven. The angelof peace argued, \”Let him not be created; he will bring contentioninto the world.\” But the angel of compassion countered, \”Let him becreated; he will bring lovingkindness into the world.\” The angel oftruth argued, \”Let him not be created; he will be deceitful and fillthe world with lies.\” And the angel of justice countered, \”Let him becreated; he will attach himself to righteousness.\” What did God do?He threw truth into the Earth and proceeded to create the humanbeing.
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