Paying Priests, Paying Parents

This past weekend, many of us celebrated Father’s Day to honor the important work our dads do. A month ago, we did the same thing to honor our mothers: BBQs and brunches, phone calls and cards in the mail, “Number 1 Mom” mugs and “World’s Best Dad” baseball caps. As a congregational rabbi, I spend...
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A Commitment to Justice Means Remembering Our Tribes

But whether or not the Sinai wilderness was ever ownerless as the midrash suggests, in North America, the so-called wildernesses never have been. Those places — and indeed every square mile of North America — have always been, and continue to be, the home of specific tribes of Indigenous peoples.
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The Times They Are Not A-Changing

Our Torah is a unique holy book and it is like none other. The torah takes us on a journey towards the Promised Land, but we never get there. The people who are in charge of our journey fail in their attempts at leadership. Our Torah portrays our leaders as fallible, mortal, and prone to...
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Bamidbar: Finding God in the Wilderness

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.
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Join the T’ruah Book Club

Join the T’ruah network in reading a timely book about human rights, learning related Jewish texts, and participating in an interactive webinar with the author. You can read together with your existing book club, with members of your synagogue or other institution, with a friend, or on your own. Or let us know if you...
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Purell, Red Heifers, and Why Not Being Racist Isn’t Enough

And at some point, I looked down at my hands and my children’s hands, spotless from washing, no dirt under our nails, and I thought about the historical chain of racist violence and state-sanctioned brutality that our hands grasped. Our social system makes certainty of our cleanliness an impossibility. Quite the opposite: we are all unclean, no matter how much we may have washed.
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Holding Onto the Image in Every Human Being, Even One’s Adversary

In the militia headquarters in Odessa decades ago, I was surrounded by harsh interrogators who castigated my friend and me for visiting Russian Jews, who were aliens in their eyes. I felt anger and even hatred at these leaders and their many followers who had made Jewish life impossible for a large segment of our...
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