Ekev
Ekev: When Our Leaders Gaslight Us
The world becomes more dangerous when leaders cannot be trusted and incontrovertible facts are subject to manipulation. Our responsibility, both as leaders and as citizens who elect them, is to value accountability.
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Ekev: Seeking a Greater Wholeness Through Civilian Oversight
It is indisputable that there is serious, ongoing, and systemic racism in the institution of American law enforcement.
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Trampling over the Torah
We should never assume our success is rubber-stamped or approved forever. Our actions can always be re-evaluated, and based on prophetic precedent, God tends to hold us to a higher standard of behavior than our neighbors, not a lower one.
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Our Wealth is Not Our Own: What Is Jewish Power For?
...the Torah teaches us that the particular and the universal are inextricably intertwined. Just as we need partners in the fight against antisemitism, we must use our power to become partners to others in the fights for social, racial, and economic justice. As the Talmud says, even a poor person who is sustained from tzedakah must also perform tzedakah (Gittin 7b). When we feel the fragility of our power, when we feel we need help, even then – precisely then – we must share what we have with others.
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Circumcised Hearts and Stiff Necks
...when we circumcise our hearts we can then turn our necks outward to the world, vulnerable, nakedly open to the experiences of others. The internal work cannot be separated from the work of changing the world, of standing shoulder to shoulder with those who are oppressed. We cannot have one without the other.
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The Drought Down the Street
Rabbi Jonah Rank examines unequal distribution of resources and the impact it has on kids in this reading of Parshat Ekev.
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Lo v’tzidkat’kha (not for your righteousness): Expulsion in Eikev (Parshat Eikev)
A d’var Torah for Parshat Eikev Just over three years ago, I sat at lunch with my husband and my food turned to ash in my mouth. I listened in horror as a man announced his candidacy for our country’s highest office, and in almost the same breath, spewed a venomous slew of accusations against...
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May Your Clothes Never Wear Out
This d’var Torah is sponsored by Bob Rottenberg in honor of his good friend and sofer, Rabbi Kevin Hale of Western Massachusetts, for above-and-beyond work reconstructing his aging tefillin. It was torture wandering in the desert, those forty years, and the Israelites let everyone know it. Over and over, throughout the books of Exodus and Numbers,...
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The Heel, the Heart and the Binary
What does Moses’ closing address to the Children of Israel have to do with gender? It’s no secret that Torah is gender specific. The Hebrew language assumes a gender binary. Rabbinic Judaism accorded the greatest amount of esteem and religious status to those whom we often refer to today as cis-gendered men – individuals who...
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Velcro, Leather, & String: Towards A New Understanding of Gender and Embodied Mitzvot
“And if you do obey these rules and observe them carefully, YHVH your God will maintain faithfully for you the covenant…” (Deuteronomy 7:12) “Therefore impress these My words upon your very heart: bind them as a sign on your hand and let them serve as a symbol on your forehead…” (Deuteronomy 11:18) “That shall be...
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