The Seismic Week That Was
Since the last time I composed a D’var Torah (effectively, sermon) to this community, on June 16, the following seismic events have taken place: in chronological order, An earthquake struck southeast Afghanistan killing approximately one thousand people; The Supreme Court limited the ability of states to pass legislation prohibiting people from carrying handguns in public on the same day that […]
Uniqueness Does Not Equal Significance; and More Ways of Exploring Torah
Not every Torah portion has us hanging on the edge of our seat with cliffhangers or narrative tension. In fact, while considered a holy document, the text of the Torah can oftentimes feel quite… mundane. So it was in this past week’s portion, Naso, whose title refers to a census the Israelites took at the base […]
Guns, Continued.
Dear Friends, I can’t believe—or, perhaps by now I can—that I’m writing about gun violence for my weekly D’var Torah for the third time in four weeks, this time for a mass shooting that took place in, essentially, the synagogue’s literal own backyard, and thus, effectively, many of your own backyards, at approximately 3rd and South Streets. Three dead—Kristopher Minners, […]
The Back and Forth of Torah and Our Lives
Some weeks, in our exploration of the weekly Torah portion, we react to the events of the world immediately around us. Other weeks the Torah portion raises themes that apply to our lives or our Judaism on a more subtle, ongoing basis. This past Shabbat we read the final parashah (portion) from the Book of Vayikra (Leviticus), a tract concerned […]
Guns.
This week, for my weekly email to the congregation, I was planning to share the remarks I delivered this past Friday evening at TGIShabbat, when I spoke about the racist massacre in a Buffalo, New York grocery store on the basis of, according to some iterations, an antisemitic conspiracy theory. The thought crossed my mind […]