Right after Pesach last year, Ziony Zevit got a string of phone calls in Jerusalem, where he was on sabbatical from his position as a professor of biblical literature and Semitic languages at the University of Judaism (UJ).
We were together in a small room, about 10 of us. Four of us were from Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. I stood with Jimmy Delshad, our temple\’s past president; his wife, Lonnie, and Temple Treasurer Kam Hekmat, as well as two members of an L.A. fact-finding mission, David Rubin and Dr. Mark Barak. We were bending over the scroll of a Torah, along with five rabbis, all dressed in combat fatigues. Each rabbi was scrutinizing it with an erudite eye.
As a Sephardic Jew representing a heritage of tolerance, intellectual honesty and tradition, my perspective on the recent \”Exodus controversy\” — which is not rooted in anger, name-calling or popular \”marketplace theologies\” which have characterized certain responses in this city — is that of the classical Sephardic Bible commentators, whose method has been described as \”the persistent demand for logic.\”
Rabbi David J. Wolpe, along with his wife and 6-month-old daughter, arrived in Los Angeles from New York on June 30.
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