From Furious to Curious

I wonder how the story would have unfolded if God had been curious rather than furious, and if when Moses came down from the mountain and witnessed the dancing, he had been able to pause and observe, noticing the feelings arising and waiting to respond until his anger had quieted down. Was it reasonable to expect these newly freed slaves, who were just beginning to experiment with their sense of autonomy, to simply wait patiently for Moses to return? 
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No More Sarahs

Last April, I traveled to Washington D.C. to visit my son at college. Georgetown University is a great place and, by all accounts, safe. We were in the bookstore when, suddenly, the entire student center was on lockdown. A policeman explained that the night before two students had been robbed at gunpoint outside the business...
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Sarah Berman

Sarah Berman is a first year rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion. An art historian and archaeologist, she worked for more than 10 years in the curatorial department at the Seattle Art Museum. There, she researched the museum’s permanent collections with a focus on provenance (history of ownership)–especially WWII era–and...
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Holding the Space

We were told earlier in the Torah to love our neighbor and even the stranger as ourselves. But these commandments are included and yet reframed in our mitzvah, "V’Ahavta et Adonai," love everything/everyone. Signaling, perhaps, that we are also to understand love differently, that we are ready to learn a higher level of embodying love.
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Shavuot 2023: A Sampling of (M)oral Torah

These 7 divrei Torah, one for each of the 7 weeks of the Omer that lead up to Shavuot, span the breadth of the entire Torah, from Genesis to Deuteronomy, and come from 7 exceptional T'ruah rabbis who lend their voices to the call for a more just and moral world.
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Creative Reconciliation (Parshat Pekudei)

Commentary on Parshat Pekudei (Exodus 38:21 – 40:38) Human beings can re-create the world, says the Torah in Parshat Pekudei. This is heartening news for Canadians. Only a few decades ago, the Canadian government supported the genocide of Indigenous peoples. But, with the closing of the last Indian residential schools, genocidal policies have come to...
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