Joseph’s Solitary Confinement

In this week’s Torah portion, Parashat Vayeshev, Joseph is cast into a Biblical version of solitary confinement. After boasting of his future successes and power over his siblings, the brothers plot to kill Joseph before deciding to throw him into a pit. Soon after, they remove him from the pit and sell him into servitude....
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Yovel Text Study: Jerusalem

While this series focuses primarily on yovel as a source of wisdom for how to approach the fiftieth anniversary of the Six Day War in 1967 and its aftermath, our project would not be complete without engaging with Jerusalem itself.
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Your Joy Is Your Sorrow Unmasked

A week ago Sunday, marked by the new moon of the Jewish month of Adar, I spent the day at the Mount Carmel Cemetery in Northeast Philadelphia, bearing witness to the desecration of 539 gravestones. Joining with Muslim, Quaker and Christian neighbors, people of faith and conscience, our hands in the earth restoring headstones, as...
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Yovel Text Study: Shofar

The Torah describes counting a cycle of seven seven-year periods—forty-nine years in all, and then sounding the shofar to announce the beginning of the yovel (Jubilee) year, during which land returns to its original owners and slaves go free. We associate the shofar primarily with Rosh Hashanah, which is known in the Torah as Yom...
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Who are YOU in the Passover story?

“…And you shall explain to your son on that day, “It is because of what Adonai did for me when I went free from Egypt…” (Exodus 13:8). From the midst of the original Exodus narrative, the text jumps suddenly forward in time, imagining you and me, future generations, retelling this sacred story in a very...
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A Shemoneh-Esreh for Israel

In 2016/5776, T’ruah gathered in front of the Israeli Consulate in New York City to celebrate Yom HaAtzma’ut. The core of the service was a series of 19 blessings for the State of Israel, modeled on the weekday Amidah that Jews traditionally recite three times a day. Each blessing was written by a rabbi, cantor, or...
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Hallel for Yom Yerushalayim

In Israel, it is common for religious Jews to celebrate Yom Yerushalayim with Hallel, the psalms of praise sung on Jewish holidays. In the US and Canada, different communities have different practices. Rabbi Ezra Weinberg has curated a series of tunes for Hallel that are thematic to Jerusalem and set a more mournful mood. This captures...
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Messianic Vision in a Zealous World

Zeal—In this day many of us are fired up. It is easy to see the injustice. It shouts at us every time we open our Facebook feeds, its red face looks up at us from the newspapers at our feet. We march, we sing, we chant. We scream out in agony demanding change. A while...
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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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