Featured Resources

WATCH: When Israel Breaks Your Heart

A briefing with Breaking the Silence about the current reality in Israel, the plan for Gaza, and the mass devastation in Gaza from a lens of understanding of the military and the work needed to build a just future.

Photo of the author, Rabbi Jacob Chatinover

Korach: The Entire People is Holy

The entire people is holy, each of them. God is with their pain and their needs. As narrow as our focus can be when we are in acute moments of pain, in struggling with what to say and when to say it as a leader, I see that there are times to push, times to be silent, and times to support.

Criticism of Israel and Antisemitism: How to Tell Where One Ends and the Other Begins

In this time of inflamed passions, it’s crucial both to ensure that criticism of Israel does not cross the line into antisemitism, and to protect the free speech of those protesting Israel’s actions.

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The Halakhic Status of the Occupation

by Rabbi Aryeh Cohen
Many groups and individuals have decried Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories on moral or legal grounds. The purpose of this white paper is to envision what the values of the halakhic tradition might be if we considered the State of Israel and its occupation through those eyes. Its analysis will also inform to some...
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When a Leader SIns

by Rabbi David Greenstein
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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Encompassing the Truth in Four Directions

by Rabbi Brandon Bernstein
In college, I used to tutor inner city middle school students through an organization called Making Waves. Once during a staff training, I was placed in a group with two Latinx tutors and two black tutors; the other group consisted of five white tutors. When my group playfully accused the supervisors of dividing us up...
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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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Yovel Text Study: Return

The Jewish mystical tradition offers depictions of periodic cosmic rebirth, in which every 50,000 years, the entire universe returns to its original state. This can be seen as a more mythic, cosmic version of a the radical notion of land-return in our earthly yovel, the biblical commandment in which every fifty years, land would return...
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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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Yovel Text Study: D’ror (Liberation)

In the yovel year, the enslaved go free; the Hebrew word d’ror refers to this release, and to liberty itself. Perhaps the most famous use of Leviticus 25:10 is on Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell, on which is enscribed: “Proclaim LIBERTY throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof”.  The iconic bell was created for the...
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Yovel Text Study: 50 Years

We don’t know exactly when the Yovel year begins. It’s the culmination of seven cycles of seven years, each culminating in a sh’mitah—sabbatical—year. The only way to arrive at Yovel is to count seven years, then seven again and again until forty-nine years have gone by. Similarly, the Torah never tells us precisely when to...
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Mob vs. Movement: Ki Tisa and the Power of the People

by Rabbi Yaakov Komisar
A group of people, fighting for a cause. It seems powerful, it seems romantic, it seems like the way to build a movement and achieve progress. But what distinguishes a movement from a mob? Five weeks ago, we stood together in shul and listened to the parshah’s recounting of the Torah’s climactic moment: the receiving...
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Your Joy Is Your Sorrow Unmasked

by Rabbi Ari Lev Fornari
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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