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A Broken Vessel
Our holy Torah knows of no perfect people. Even the founder of our religion, Abraham, the first Hebrew, is a flawed individual. Between the ages of 75, when, as Abram, he received his promise from God that he would become “a great nation” to the age of 99, when Sarah gave birth to Isaac, the…
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Striking a Balance
The Torah portion for this week contains two stories, one of destruction and one of dispersal. In the story of Noah, God regrets that he has created humankind. The Torah tells us that the “earth was filled with lawlessness”. According to the sages, a merchant would bring a cartload of grapes through the marketplace. This…
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Choosing in Life
In our Torah reading for this week, Moses tells the Israelites, “I place before you today life and goodness, death and evil” (Deuteronomy 30:15). The rabbis ask a question: Does this mean that Moses is giving the people a choice, and that they are free to choose death and evil over life and goodness? That…
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The Universal Word
What word in the English language is the most understood around the world? This word appears in our Torah portion this week. When you say this word, people in Europe understand it, people in South America understand it, and in Africa, and across the Middle and the Far East all understand this word. In fact,…
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Shaping our Lives
This week we begin the Jewish month of Elul. It is the month leading up to the New Year, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. It is the month when we engage in heshbon ha-nefesh, an accounting of our strengths and our weaknesses, our struggles and our failures. It is a time…
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Double Blessings
A few weeks ago, my seminary sent out a fundraising pitch that was hard to refuse. The letter said that if we contributed to the fund raiser in the next two weeks, our gift would be matched by an anonymous contributor up to a certain amount. My contribution to a cause I believed in would…
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Purim In August
When I was in the eighth grade my friend Ted accosted me excitedly one morning before class. “I have a hilarious joke that I just learned,” he said. “There were two bears in a bathtub. One bear said to the other, ‘Pass the soap please’. The second bear said, ‘No soap radio’.” Ted began to…
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A Faith of Listening
Judaism has always been more about belonging than believing. When Ruth expresses her desire to join Naomi following the death of Ruth’s husband, rather than return to her native Moab, she says, “Your people will be my people, your God will be my God”, (Ruth 1:16) preferencing “peoplehood” over belief in God. The most famous…
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The Miracles of Everyday Life
In the Book of Deuteronomy, Moses assembles the Israelites and recounts the past forty years of their experience together. He reminds them of “the wondrous feats that you saw with your own eyes, those prodigious signs and marvels.” “Yet,” he continues, “The Eternal has not given you a mind to understand or eyes to see or…
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A Summary Execution?
Last week’s parasha closed with the Israelites, encamped at a place called Shittim. There, they begin to commit harlotry with the daughters of Moab, a pagan people. A plague breaks out among the people, an expression of God’s displeasure (to say the least) with the Israelite’s descent into paganism. An Israelite prince named Zimri brings…
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Rabbi Marc D. Rudolph 