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 […]
How To Wrestle with God
What a joy to be celebrating Noah Schindler becoming Bar Mitzvah with you all. Noah’s Torah portion is vayishlach, and while of course all 54 Torah portions are equally sacred, there is something pretty special about this one, because it’s the one that gives us our name—Yisrael, Israel. Noah’s portion contains the etymology, the origin story, […]
How Not To Measure Our Self-Worth | Investigating Our Own True Motivations
Last week, we celebrated the Bat Mitzvah of Sarah Tobacman. Sarah’s parashah (Torah portion) was Vayetze a phrase which literally translates to “he left,” as in Jacob, our ancestor, left his hometown of Be’er Sheva—fled it, is more accurate—after purloining the patriarchal blessing of his father Isaac, a blessing which had been intended for Jacob’s slightly older twin brother […]
Comfort in the Unknown, Faith in the Other
When we celebrate a Bar Mitzvah in our synagogue community, we like to offer, in this weekly email a summary of the teaching offered by the young person in our community who celebrated becoming Bar Mitzvah. This past week it was Xander Segal, who, according to his mother Verna, is the fourth generation in his family to […]