God Heals Our Wounds

God Heals Our Wounds

Sep 10, 2011 By Abigail Treu | Commentary | Text Study | Ki Tetzei

The suffering of those we love stays with us and affects us deeply, years after the fact; in Deuteronomy, Moses finds himself thinking about his deceased sister’s illness and the pain he felt at her suffering many years prior, and now we find ourselves thinking about the events of 9/11 and recalling the pain we felt a decade ago.

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The Jewish “Lost and Found”

The Jewish “Lost and Found”

Aug 21, 2010 By Daniel Nevins | Commentary | Ki Tetzei

Few sights are as pathetic as the mountain of lost items accumulated at a summer camp or school at the end of the season. Clothes that once were valuable to their owners (or at least, to their parents) now lie dirty and discarded in a noisome heap that no one wants to touch. Perhaps in the premodern world, where people stayed put and personal effort was required to manufacture each item, fewer things got lost.

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Standing at the Foot of God’s Mountain

Standing at the Foot of God’s Mountain

Aug 29, 2009 By Abigail Treu | Commentary | Ki Tetzei

My beautiful daughter is no longer a newborn at fourteen weeks. Even more striking than the swift flow of time since her birth is the fleeting function of memory. I can no longer picture her in my mind as she looked in the first few weeks, just as I can no longer imagine my five-year-old son the way he looked when he was fourteen weeks old—or my little sister, now in her thirties, as she looked when we were kids. The images replace themselves, as a teacher of mine once put it.

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New Beginnings

New Beginnings

Sep 13, 2008 By David M. Ackerman | Commentary | Ki Tetzei

September marks new beginnings. Summer’s over, school years have begun, heavy traffic has returned to the roads, the new cultural season is underway.

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The Status of Women

The Status of Women

Sep 17, 2005 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Ki Tetzei

At JTS’s opening barbecue for faculty and their families last week, my son and daughter-in-law told us sheepishly that their fourteenth wedding anniversary had caught them unawares.

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Redeemed for This Reason

Redeemed for This Reason

Sep 17, 2005 By Matthew Berkowitz | Commentary | Ki Tetzei

Hurricane Katrina united our country in common empathy and purpose. The outpouring of support, monetary and otherwise, has been greater than most of us could have hoped for or imagined. But was it really so surprising? The Torah suggests that our national response was correct but would not have expected any less.

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“You must not remain indifferent”

“You must not remain indifferent”

Aug 28, 2004 By JTS Alumni | Commentary | Ki Tetzei

By Rabbi Marc Sack (RS ’82)

My grandfather was a storyteller, not by profession, but by nature. He never lost an opportunity to tell my siblings and me about his journey to this country and the travails of his life. By profession, he was a fruit peddler. He had a large van-like truck that he loaded with fruits and vegetables every morning, going out to the neighborhoods in and around Hartford to hawk his goods. Sometimes, my grandfather hired teenagers to help him on the truck. In fact, I, myself, did this for a couple of summers. One of these helpers — this must have been in the early 1950s — was an African American teen. One summer morning, my grandfather and his helper finished loading the truck and stopped at a restaurant for breakfast. They sat down at a table, but the owner said that he would not serve the young man. The way my grandfather told it, he said to the owner, “If you won’t serve him, you won’t serve me,” and they got up and left the restaurant.

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Before the Geneva Conventions

Before the Geneva Conventions

Sep 6, 2003 By Lewis Warshauer | Commentary | Ki Tetzei

Yitzhak Rabin, in his acceptance speech on the occasion of receiving the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1994, said:

At an age when most youngsters are struggling to unravel the secrets of mathematics and the mysteries of the Bible; at an age when first love blooms; at the tender age of sixteen, I was handed a rifle so that I could defend myself. That was not my dream. I wanted to be a water engineer. I studied in an agricultural school and I thought being a water engineer was an important profession in the parched Middle East. I still think so today. However, I was compelled to resort to the gun.

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The Courage to Get Married

The Courage to Get Married

Sep 6, 2003 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Ki Tetzei

It takes courage to get married. Divorce statistics attest to the high risk of failure. Yet ours is not the first generation to appreciate the demanding complexity of matrimony. A charming rabbinic tale suggests that the rabbis already deemed every successful marriage a miracle, the blessed product of divine intervention.

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The Trouble with the Rebellious Child

The Trouble with the Rebellious Child

Aug 17, 2002 By Joshua Heller | Commentary | Ki Tetzei

There are those who think that the world and human nature, are ordered and deterministic, that people can be profiled and categorized, their behavior predicted by psychological or statistical models. Having a child has made me newly appreciative of the role that disorder and unpredictability play in the world. On the day–to–day level, all plans and schedules have taken on a new level of tentativity, and getting through an airport security checkpoint suddenly requires a whole new level of coordination.

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Lost Property and Lost Souls

Lost Property and Lost Souls

Sep 1, 2001 By Lauren Eichler Berkun | Commentary | Ki Tetzei

It is easy to get lost amid the lengthy list of laws in this week’s Torah portion. In this way, parashat Ki Tetse represents many of our experiences with Jewish learning. Where do I begin? There is so much here to learn! In fact, serious Jewish learning has traditionally begun with a focus on one of the laws found in this week’s parashah.

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The Commandment to Be an Upstander

The Commandment to Be an Upstander

Sep 9, 2000 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Ki Tetzei

In July, 1994, I returned to Esslingen, the medieval town not far from Stuttgart, Germany where my mother was born. My grandfather ran a boarding school and enjoyed a regional reputation as an innovative educator. The handsome building which housed it still serves as a school, though no longer Jewish, and bears his name, bestowed by the city fathers a decade earlier in a spirit of contrition. That summer, school and city officials commemorated the 50th anniversary of my grandfather’s death in Theresienstadt, and invited me to speak at the event held on the premises of the school in the room which had once been its synagogue.

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Ki Tetzei

Ki Tetzei

Jan 1, 1980

1 Shout, O barren one,
You who bore no child!
Shout aloud for joy,
You who did not travail!
For the children of the wife forlorn
Shall outnumber those of the espoused

— said the Lord. —

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Ki Tetzei

Ki Tetzei

Jan 1, 1980

10 When you take the field against your enemies, and the Lord your God delivers them into your power and you take some of them captive, 11 and you see among the captives a beautiful woman and you desire her and would take her to wife, 12 you shall bring her into your house, and she shall trim her hair, pare her nails, 13 and discard her captive’s garb.

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