Some things should continue to awaken our sense of outrage, because not to be outraged is to cease to be human. We should not surrender our humanity without a fight, even if we know we will lose that fight in the end.
Remember When? Guest Post by Gila Green
In my novel Passport Control my heroine, Miriam Gil, doesn’t have much to go on when it comes to memory. Indeed, there is not a line in the novel she begins with anything close to “Remember when?” She cannot give what she doesn’t have, not to her new friends in the novel, though she comes to love them, and not to the reader.
Parashat Sh’mot
When Moshe is told to go back to Egypt and free the Israelites, he asks “What if they won’t believe me?” God’s answer is in the form of symbolic wonders, each of which involve things becoming something contrary to their nature: a healthy hand that becomes leprous, and a staff that becomes a snake. But why a snake? The choice of this particular animal is no coincidence. In fact, it’s the key to Moshe’s mission!
Halakhah: Language or Operating Manual?
We often internalize Jewish tradition to such an extent that we act on it without conscious awareness, much the way we speak a language without consciously being aware of grammar. Is this a good thing? Is it better to perform an act in full awareness of what we’re doing and why? Or, is it better to internalize right actions to such an extent that we never even consider an alternative?
Fall Pickings: The November Jewish Book Carnival
Here in Israel the first rains have fallen and the nights are getting cooler. A great time to get cozy under the covers with a glass of wine and a good book. Here are some recommendations from around the Jewish blogosphere.
Parashat Toledot: Learning from God’s bad example
While the Torah explicitly cautions against putting the younger before the elder in terms of inheritance, time and time again, the narrative portions of the Torah provide a lesson to the contrary: Yitzhak before Yishmael, Yaakov before Esau, Rahel before Leah, Yoseph before all his elder brothers, and Ephraim before Menashe. What is the meaning of this odd discord between law and example? What is the Torah trying to tell us?
The Yeshiva of Shem & Ever: A midrashic view of cultural legacies
Why is Avraham depicted coming back from the Akeda alone? Where was Yitzhak? The sages of the Talmud offer a strange answer: he was off studying Torah with Shem, the favored son of Noah! What are we to make of this notion? Are we to conclude that Yitzhak put on a suit and hat and sat down in a classroom? Such a simplistic understanding misses the point entirely. The less literal interpretation is both richer and more meaningful.
Just Add Love – Guest Post by Irris Makler
Our first guest post is by Irris Makler, a foreign correspondent and author based in Jerusalem. For more than three years she’s been gathering the life stories and recipes of Holocaust Survivors and photographing them with their grandchildren. Now, she’s collecting all of these together in a book, Just Add Love – Holocaust Survivors Share their Stories and Recipes. Here, she shares one story that unfolded while she was writing it, a meditation on memory, involving the family on the book’s cover.
Torah – A Contract with Eternity
It often surprises those who know Jews only as “the people of the Book” that the greater part of Jewish observance is not to be found in the written Torah at all. The Judaism we know today would be unrecognizable to those who stood at Sinai. There are those who argue that this process of continual re-interpretation has made the Judaism of our day less “authentic” than that of our ancestors’ time. And yet, if we believe that God has had a hand in our history, we must see the Torah as being continuously given via the same hand that puts these challenges in our path and requires us to adapt to them.
Parashat Haazinu: The Perils of Success
History shows that civilizations rise, reach their peak, and decline into oblivion. And yet, one small nation somehow managed to escape that fate. But how? This weak’s parashah offers a recipe to escape the cycle, but it is a drastic one indeed!
