We are commanded to be holy in this parshah and “to not profit by the blood of our fellow.” (Leviticus 19:16) This means that we are obligated to do our best in preventing worker abuse.
That the Torah addresses the concerns that civilization inevitably brings, along with awareness of the need for individuals to experience God in wilderness, seems to me a profound grappling with the needs both of human beings and of God’s non-human world.
...being in Israel over the last several months has shown me almost daily how easy it is to defile something that’s important to us because of zealotry and jealousy.
The problem with taking my children to Disney World is that upon returning home, they kvetch about wanting to return to the Happiest Place on Earth. The thousands of junky Disney calories and hundreds of amusements lead my children and, I must ruefully confess, me, to “grow fat and kick”,” in the words of the...
No one likes to admit this, but, (deep breath) truthfully, I am prejudiced. I internalized at an early age that many kinds of people who do not look like me cannot be trusted. Even as I heard these things and thought that they were not true, the warnings lodged in my body. So much so...
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...
“Diamonds are a girl’s best friend,” so the song says. And so might be rubies, sapphires, amethysts, and the whole gamut of precious and semi-precious stones that shine and shimmer when dangling from a bracelet or sitting pretty in a ring. And why not – they sparkle and shine, and the many variations and colors...
We can imagine how miserable it was for Noah, his wife Naamah, and their whole family, spending nearly a year in the ark, filled with pairs of every animal and bird species – let alone seven pairs of the kosher animals! Yet, it seems that somehow Noah was hesitant to leave the ark. He sends...