Rabbi Ruhi Sophia Motzkin Rubenstein

VaEra: It’s Our Time to be the Protagonists of History

In this moment, we do not know how things will turn out, in Israel or the U.S. But if Torah and history have anything to teach us, it is that whatever happens is not inevitable, and the catalyst will not be something we could have predicted in advance. This moment, like all moments, is full of possibility. It will be those with proactive vision who will move history, just as it always has been.
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Photo of the author, Rabbi Aaron Leven

Shmini: “Aaron was Silent”

Real intimacy — with the Divine and with each other — is an ability to say I will show up, but only if I can demand that when there is destruction there is rebuilding, when there is grief there is space to mourn, when there is heartbreak there is space for healing.
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Photo of the author, Rabbi Alicia Harris

Pesach: Cleanse the Spiritual Chametz this Pesach

This is the work before us this Pesach. We must abandon our worship of the false idol of correctness. We have to start with what we know. We know that all people need peace to survive. We know the liberation of Israelis is bound up with the liberation of Palestinians and vice versa. We know being traumatized is not a way to live. We also know that clinging to the crumbs of winning an argument only takes us further away from peace.
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Pursue Justice So That You May Truly Live

This week’s Torah portion contains one of the most famous justice-related verses in Torah: “צֶ֥דֶק צֶ֖דֶק תִּרְדֹּ֑ף, / tzedek tzedek tirdof” — “Justice, justice shall you pursue!” Although the parsha begins with the injunction to establish judges, this instruction — to pursue justice — doesn’t seem to be aimed solely at those whose job it...
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Eish Zarah: The Feeling of Being Foreign

I had never been inside Perth Amboy’s quaint, two room art gallery on the outskirts of this heavily Hispanic town in Central New Jersey. What brought me inside at this moment, nearly four years after I moved to Perth Amboy to be the rabbi of Congregation Beth Mordecai, the remaining synagogue in town, was not...
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Of Migrants and Midwives

While we know the names of Shifra and Puah, the Egyptian midwives who disobeyed Pharaoh and saved Jewish baby boys, in Parashat VaYislach we meet an unnamed midwife who is present for the precarious birth of Benjamin. According to Genesis 35:16-19, while our migrant ancestors were on an arduous journey en route from Beth El...
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An Echo of Shofar

At the end of June, my husband and I took our daughter, Zohar, to Harrisburg. She was six months old at the time. We each put on a tallit (the baby’s was a black onesie screen-printed with an image of a tallit) and gathered in a tent on the Capitol steps along with rabbis, cantors...
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The Just Harvest of Summer

The intoxicating smell of ripe fruit is just too enticing. My niece takes a bite from one of the peaches we have been picking from an orchard this morning. As the juice runs down her chin, she gives me a sheepish smile as if asking if it is OK for her to be doing this....
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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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