On Arendt: Creating a Zionism That Owns Its Mistakes

Hannah Arendt would find it very tricky to be a Zionist today. She was critical of David Ben Gurion’s policy of effectively ignoring the Palestinians’ sincere pursuit of national sovereignty. She advocated a Zionism that would be achieved through excellent relations with the Palestinian neighbors, rather than in spite of them. In her essay “To...
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From Racism to Liberation: Confronting Tzara’at in Our Society

In our parashah, we learn about the mysterious affliction tzara’at. Further on in the Book of Numbers, Miriam the Prophetess is stricken with tzara’at as a punishment for speaking against her brother Moses. Miriam and her other brother Aaron – we’ll have to save the question of why Aaron goes unpunished for another d’var Torah...
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The Logo of the Jewish People

All of Jewish theology can be summed up in this week’s sedra, Beha’alotecha. After many weeks of reading about the events at Mt. Sinai, the cloud of God’s glory lifts from the Tabernacle as a signal for the desert journey to resume (Numbers 10:11). That cloud is the key. We first encountered it as the...
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The Holiness of Blemishes

Those of us concerned for the basic human rights of the physically and mentally disabled can easily be dismayed by this week’s Torah portion, Emor. For while Leviticus promises universal access to the sacred, this portion seems to restrict direct access to God to an ever- smaller subset of a tiny priestly minority. This portion...
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My trip to Immokalee

CONGREGATION SHA’AREI KODESH 2nd Day of Passover MARCH 27, 2013 ©  RABBI LOUIS RIESER   Hag kasher v’Sameah. I want to thank Rabbi Baum for this invitation to speak about my experience in Immokalee with T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights.  In January I joined 9 other rabbis to learn first-hand about the conditions...
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Rosh Pinna: Keystone of Justice

I am standing by a pristine mountain stream at 10,000 ft. in the Wind River Range in Wyoming and sobbing. My hiking partner Ed, whose family has been here for hundreds of years, has just said to me that the land belongs to me as much as it does to him. That was nearly 40...
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The Myth of Jewish Unity

We American Jews are a divided people living in a divided nation. The natural and common response to such division is a call for unity. While unity in theory is a noble aspiration, the call for unity among a group of people often reflects a dangerous and anti-Jewish desire to erase or ignore differences. The...
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Silence Implicates Us

“The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem is silence.” These words were spoken by Rabbi Joachim Prinz, one of two Jews to speak at the March on Washington in 1963 alongside the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Rabbi Prinz knew of which he spoke, having served the Jewish community...
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