Hope and a Listening Ear

I have now heard the moaning of the Israelites because the Egyptians are holding them in bondage, and I have remembered My covenant. (Exodus 6:5) It seems these days I have an endless array of guest speakers in my congregation: about the Syrian refugee crisis, about the death penalty, about homelessness, about the violence fraying...
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Opening the Narrow Straits with Advance Care Planning

We have come to the end of Genesis, and with it the conclusion of the stories of our matriarchs and patriarchs. For the last several weeks we have been engaged with the stories of the children of Jacob, focusing mainly on his favored son, Joseph. Now Joseph is on his deathbed. We are privy to...
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“Good for the Jews”: Not a Zero-Sum Game

The Israelites’ Egyptian bondage was Joseph’s fault. Ok, I admit, the Egyptians were directly to blame. But Joseph’s economic reforms laid the foundation for the enslavement. Let me explain. After Jacob and his sons relocated to Egypt, the famine worsened. Joseph oversaw the collection of funds from the people of Egypt in return for rations...
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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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Let Us See Your Goodness

On the heels of the great sin of Israel–worshipping an oversized molten calf while Moses took “so long coming down from the mountain” (Exodus 32)–Moses implores God not to desert the Israelites. “See, You tell me, ‘lead this people forward’ but you have not told me whom You will send with me. If You Yourself...
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Inescapable Face

“There is a commandment in the appearance of the face, as if a master spoke to me. However, at the same time, the face of the Other is destitute; it is the poor for whom I can do all, and to whom I owe all. “ —Emmanuel Levinas Rabbi Joshua, the son of Levi, said: at...
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Protesting Leshem Shamayim

The old Yiddish proverb laments, “It is not easy to be a Jew.” Moshe might add, “How much the more so to be a Jewish leader.” Parashat Korach appears in what Everett Fox refers to as “the rebellion narratives” in the Book of Bamidbar. Was Moshe Rabbenu blessed with the congregation from hell? After their...
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Modern Barbecue

I have had a strange relationship with eating meat over the course of my life. At some points I have cut out red meat, then all meat, and now “some meat depending on what it looks like.” My aversion to meat has a lot to do with its appearance, its preparation, and how it is...
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Crying Out Loud

A year ago exactly, we were preparing for our Human Trafficking Awareness Shabbat. The theme resonated so much–as it still does today–with the biblical narrative: Jewish bondage in Egypt. We never expected that a real life sex trafficking case would happen practically on our doorstep. It happened two blocks south of our synagogue, in the...
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The Fishpond

My in-laws have a koi pond in their backyard. When we visited them over Sukkot, my son Barzilai—a year and three quarters old—fell in love with it. “Peepch!” he said all weekend—wonderingly, demandingly, enthusiastically—as he dragged me to the pond’s edge to peer into it; “Peepch! Mahm! [Fish! Mayim!]” This was not the first time...
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