Bedouin

For Parshat Chukat, Rabbi Benjamin Barnett writes about the challenges facing Israel's Bedouin.

The midrash teaches that the first human/adam was created with soil from the ground / afar min ha’adamah from every direction, meaning from every place, so that no matter where the first human’s progeny wandered, they would still be at home. Wherever a person dies and is buried, their bodies will not be strangers to the soil,...

This summer in Israel/Palestine, I visited several Bedouin communities. At Al Araqib I marched with the women and girls of the village—which the IDF has leveled more than 100 times in the last six years—from one of its hastily re-erected gathering spaces, across the desert hills, under the hot summer sun, to a building in...

Historical Background and Government Development Demographics and Socio-Economic Politics Land Disputes and the Goldberg Commission Plan, Prawer Plan, and Begin Plan

Nathan Roller, a T’ruah Israel Fellow and student at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies, shares his experience planting two trees–one in the West Bank and one in Israel–as part of the T’ruah Year-in-Israel Program. Donate $36 or more to support this important tree-planting project in 2019.

Ribbono Shel Olam, Master of the Universe — Shekhinah, Whose wings shelter creation — Once our people wandered the desert sands. Now we merely vacation in rootlessness While our Bedouin neighbors perch Without permission, their goats forbidden to graze. Time after time the bulldozers tear down homes And playgrounds, uprooting spindly olive trees To make...

The Torah portion that we have just read tells a story about Abraham and Sarah, Hagar and Ishmael, which is both moving and troubling. A number of years earlier, at the suggestion of Sarah, who had reached old age without being able to bear a child, Abraham had a son with Sarah’s servant Hagar. Abraham...