Yovel Text Study: Make the Year Holy

In The Sabbath, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel famously frames Jewish perceptions of holiness as holiness in time rather than in space: “The quality of holiness is not in the grain of matter.  It is a preciousness bestowed upon things by an act of consecration and persisting in relation to God.”  He describes Shabbat as a...
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Fat Torah: Emerging Together from the Shadow of Fear

I loved the cover of my first album. It was all swirls of red and blue painted by my friend Eileen. The year was 1996, and I was proudly selling my CDs (and cassette tapes!) after finishing a performance. One woman bought a CD, took one look at it, shook her head, and said, “Your...
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When a Leader SIns

This Torah portion begins the book’s extensive treatment of the sacrificial system that was practiced in Israel for more than 1000 years. And it is now some 2000 years since we stopped offering sacrifices. In the interim we have developed a sense of distance from that ancient cultic practice. Nevertheless, it may still be possible...
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What is THAT doing on my seder plate??

This year, I’ve found myself obsessing over the Passover Seder plate. I don’t usually do that, I promise! I like it, don’t get me wrong, I just don’t dwell on it all that much. But this year, I have been reading a fair amount of sources on new symbols that can be added to (or...
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Praying That God Is Not Nauseous

“The land vomits you out?!” one of my congregants in my weekly parshah class exclaimed. We were learning parshat Behar. I was trying to explain the conditions in which we are allowed by God to dwell in the land of Israel. In order to dwell in the land we must act with holiness, following God’s...
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The Fast of Inevitability

“This isn’t a marathon we’re in. It’s a sprint.” I was privileged to hear Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum say these words to a small group of rabbis last week, and it chilled my blood. It was the exact opposite of what I have been hearing from activists since November 9th, that we need to prepare and...
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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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Al Chet Sh’chatanu

I felt rage and disappointment in their choices and positions. Being a rabbi in Texas meant I was constantly trying to connect our moral traditions to political action, while simultaneously removing any hint of partisanship from the conversation. For a long time, I walked the delicate balance, recognizing that while our values relate to our...
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Lift Up Your Lulav And Yourself

This past summer, my family moved out of our cramped New York apartment and into a beautiful new home in western Massachusetts. The people are wonderful, there are farmstands selling local fruits and veggies everywhere, and there are lots of hiking trails minutes from our front door. But if you’ve ever moved to a new...
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Yitro the Activist

In the grand scheme of things, Yitro is actually a pretty minor biblical character. His name is only mentioned 12 times in the entirety of the Torah. Yet for someone as minor as he is, he’s got quite the midrashic backstory. The midrash (Devarim Rabbah 1:5, Kohelet Rabbah 3:11, and elsewhere) states that Yitro sampled all of the...
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