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weekly parasha

Guess how much I love you [Parashat Vaetchanan – Deuteronomy 3:23-7:11]

There is a well-known children’s book depicting a nut-brown hare and its child playing a game called “Guess How Much I Love You.” In it, the child stretches tall and wide, jumps high and reaches toward the horizon to show his affection for the parent. In response, the parent always seems to extend the love just a little further. “I love you to the moon!” the child ultimately says, expressing the largest quantifiable measure of love within his grasp. And with patient simplicity, the parent responds, “I love you to the moon … and back.” The book’s message isn’t about love without limits. It’s better than that. It is a genuine expression of love met with even more love.

‘God is a fraud’

In this week’s parasha, Beha’alotecha, Moses faces the fragility of life as he watches his sister, Miriam, struggle with tzara’at, a dangerous skin disease. Overcome with anguish, Moses cries out to God. His five-word prayer, the shortest recorded in the Torah, beseeches the Holy One: El na r’fa na la (O God, please heal her). God hears, and miraculously Miriam is healed (Numbers 12:1-16). For some, this parasha provides comfort that, indeed, our prayers for healing work. And then there are people like Sarah.

Refining Our Souls: Parashat Shemini (Leviticus 9:1-11:47)

The aphorism “you are what you eat” first appeared in French and then in German in the 1800s, and was then brought into English in the 1920s by nutritionist Victor Lindlahr, the inventor of the “catabolic diet.” Hippie foodies later adopted the phrase in the 1960s.

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More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.

More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.