Parshat Chaye Sarah opened with the death of the matriarch Sarah and her eventual burial. Avraham was confronted with the death of his life partner, and in that moment he was grieving and found himself in need of a place to bury his beloved. Naturally, he wanted to bury her somewhere near his home, so he went and asked the Hittites, the locals, for a burial place. The Hittites replied that Avraham was a good person (paraphrasing) and...Read more...
Two years ago, I had one of the proudest and happiest days of my life. When Ayelet stood in our sanctuary and read from the Torah, I was filled with so much emotion. We had known the date of Ayelet’s Bat Mitzvah for quite some time. Ayelet was born on Shabbat and thus precisely on the Torah portion וירא/VaYera. We found it to be so meaningful because of our difficult journey to be parents, and the difficulty of Abraham and Sarah to...Read more...
Where did this all begin? When did our connection to the Land of Israel start? Many have tried to erase the historic and irrefutable record of Jewish/Hebrew/Israelite presence in the Land of Israel and many have failed. At the end of Parshat Noach we meet a new person, Terach, and his family who lived in Ur (modern day Iraq). The text tells us he took his son and daughter-in-law, Abram and Sarai, their nephew (from Abram’s brother), Lot,...Read more...
The following resources are good sources of information about the war in Israel. They include emails you can sign up for, websites to stay connected to, podcasts, and YouTube channels. I believe all of them will do a far better job of keeping us informed and educated than our local, national and cable news.
Emails:
AJC (American Jewish Committee)
They will send updates on the latest relevant info from Israel. You can...Read more...
Disappointment and regret. Those are the feelings God expressed after only ten generations into the history of the world. God created the world with such great hope and faith that this world would be meaningful and beautiful. But all of creation turned out to be corrupted, violent and wrong. It was at this moment God decided that perhaps creation was not all that it was cracked up to be. At this moment, God looked...Read more...
