One Thing I Ask
This past week, as part of our celebrating our first Bat Mitzvah of the year (Mazal Tov, Madeleine Wilson!), I shared the following D’var Torah: In a few moments, we’re going to sing a verse of a psalm that anchors us in the season in which we find ourselves, the season of the Yamim Nora’im, […]
Building New Worlds with our Torah
One of the core features of the Bar Mitzvah is when a student offers his own teaching, his own D’var Torah—words of Torah reflecting his interpretation of his Torah portion after a period of wrestling with it. As Rabbis Arthur Waskow and Phyllis Berman put it, “This is the core of the Bar Mitzvah event, […]
A Bar Mitzvah Student Grapples with the Scapegoat • (Im)purity: Alienation vs Integration
Dear Friends, This Shabbat, we celebrated the Bar Mitzvah for Elias Zaring. Elias’s parashah, as will be discussed below, was the double portion of achareit-mot/kedoshim, two portions in the midst of the book of Leviticus that include the portion that is read each year on Yom Kippur, involving the ritual of “the scapegoat,” where the High […]
What Covenant Can Mean To Us • Boundaries, People!
I want to share the D’var Torah I delivered this past Friday night on the week’s parashah, on the eve of our student Alex Howe’s Bar mitzvah: I was drawn to a very specific part of this week’s parashah, this week’s Torah portion. Perhaps you’ll be able to sense why. First a couple of verses […]
Refugee Shabbat • Song of the Sea
I know I say this to all the B’nei Mitzvah students, Yul, but you really have a special parashah. So much so that your shabbat has a special name—Shabbat Shirah, the Shabbat of Song. Named, of course, after Shirat Hayam, the Song of the Sea—the most visibly noteworthy part of the entire Torah, composed as […]