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Moving Forward
Feb 4, 2012 By Abigail Treu | Commentary | Text Study | Beshallah
What a wonderful feature of being human, that we are so different that even our shared experiences produce in us such a wide range of possible emotions. Despair, regret, aggression, complaint—the midrash imagines that different people, standing at the shore of the Sea of Reeds with Pharoah’s army closing in from behind, felt each in different measure.
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Moses on the Nile
Jan 14, 2012 By Abigail Treu | Commentary | Text Study | Shemot
Here we are given a midrash imagining not only Miriam’s role as a young prophet, but also the emotional turmoil she and her father, Amram, endured as Moses is born and then sent off in his basket down the Nile.
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Slaves Will One Day Be Free
Dec 17, 2011 By Abigail Treu | Commentary | Text Study | Vayeshev
In the narrative unfolding of the biblical drama, the Joseph story accounts for the arrival of Jacob’s sons and their descendants in Egypt. It also serves to introduce one of the main themes to emerge from the rest of the biblical story: the overturning of oppression with redemption.
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Our Aging Bodies
Nov 18, 2011 By Abigail Treu | Commentary | Text Study | Hayyei Sarah
If the rabbis could imagine Abraham’s dismay at the physical signs of aging, how much more so for us, men and women, living in a culture in which we are constantly bombarded with visual images of young, vigorous bodies?
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Reason Versus Faith
Oct 22, 2011 By Abigail Treu | Commentary | Text Study | Bereishit
If the ancients worried to prove God’s existence, the challenge of Darwinian evolution posed an even greater threat: counterevidence to the biblical account of Creation. In the postmodern era, we Jews-in-the-center find ourselves oddly caught in the middle of a debate portrayed in the news media as between those who insist literally on the biblical account and those who reject it altogether.
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Work Transforming into Joy
Oct 14, 2011 By Abigail Treu | Commentary | Sukkot
In my mind’s eye, I maintain quite an idealized image of Sukkot. I imagine a beautiful sukkah, resting on a lush green lawn, surrounded by trees not quite yet at the peak of autumn. I sit with my family and friends, leisurely enjoying a delicious meal (which appears magically, costs nothing, and requires no cleanup), under a radiant blue sky during the day and a glittering canopy of stars at night. The tension between ideal and real: exactly where we should be, four days after Yom Kippur.
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The Strength of Our Communities
Sep 18, 2011 By Abigail Treu | Commentary | Text Study | Nitzavim | Vayeilekh
At this season of self-reflection, our thoughts naturally turn to our own individual acts of the year gone by. But the teshuvah process climaxes on the Yamim Nora’im, when we stand together in packed sanctuaries, finding power in our solidarity as a community.
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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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Consequences as Judgement
Aug 27, 2011 By Abigail Treu | Commentary | Text Study | Re'eh
Part of the problem with the theology of reward and punishment (or blessings and curses, as it is couched in the parashah this week) is that we know it to not be true. We have all seen good people live and die tragically, and others deserving punishment living long, happy lives. It is difficult, as sophisticated thinkers, to apply the reward-and-punishment idea in any satisfying way to reality as we know it.
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Challenging the God of Eikev
Aug 20, 2011 By Abigail Treu | Commentary | Eikev
Parashat Eikev, for me, is brutal. The crush of the Deuteronomic God, the if-then God of wrath and punishment, is overbearing. The choice that God offers in our parashah is not a choice: “And if you do obey these rules and observe them carefully, the Lord your God will maintain faithfully for you the covenant that He made on oath with your fathers: He will favor you and bless you . . . (Deut. 7:12–13). On the other hand: “If you do forget the Lord your God and follow other gods to serve them or bow down to them, I warn you this day that you shall certainly perish . . . ” (Deut. 8:19). The God of Eikev infantilizes, expecting that we will respond to an if-then choice, which is not a choice at all but rather a display of raw power.
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Now I Am Old
Aug 13, 2011 By Abigail Treu | Commentary | Text Study | Va'et-hannan
There was a time
You would never have said, “Enough!”
A time when your passion
Burned
For me
The Blessing for What Goes Into our Food
Jul 30, 2011 By Abigail Treu | Commentary | Text Study | Masei
Are blessings over food spontaneous or rote? Do we bless our food out of gratitude for nourishment—or do we use the moments surrounding that most basic animal act of eating for spiritual uplift?
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Justice and Mercy
Jul 16, 2011 By Abigail Treu | Commentary | Text Study | Pinehas
The feminist in me adores this midrash: a tannaitic (first- or second-century CE) work acknowledging misogyny and extolling the women in this week’s parashah who appeal to a gender-blind God for mercy. With ever-present news stories of the gender-based gap in wages and job retention, the plea of the daughters of Zelophehad is still relevant.
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Identities of Choice
Jul 2, 2011 By Abigail Treu | Commentary | Text Study | Naso
We live in an age in which we are all Jews by Choice. Whether born to Jewish parents or not, in 21st-century America our identities are a matter of our own selection.
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Both Sides of Forgiveness
Jul 2, 2011 By Abigail Treu | Commentary | Text Study | Hukkat
This far into Numbers, we are inured to the Israelites’ complaints. The complaint of Numbers 21 takes place in five quick verses and stands out more for the unusual bit about the snakes than it does for the fact or content of the Israelites’ gripe.
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Holding On to Torah
Jun 18, 2011 By Abigail Treu | Commentary | Text Study | Shelah Lekha
The metaphor is wonderful: the man at sea is Israel, grasping the tzitzit, with God the Captain of the ship stretching out a hand, holding the other end of the lifeline. As with all metaphors, it is not to be taken literally.
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The Ancestral Roots of our Morals
May 21, 2011 By Abigail Treu | Commentary | Text Study | Vayikra
How wonderful to derive a great lesson from such a simple turn of phrase.
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Man’s Plans vs. God’s Plans
May 20, 2011 By Abigail Treu | Commentary | Text Study | Behukkotai
I have such good intentions when I start off my day or my week.
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The Cycles of Nature
May 7, 2011 By Abigail Treu | Commentary | Text Study | Emor
A midrash for any attorney or accountant to love, the last line of which already rings with the oy vey iz mir tone which has come down to us via Tevye and Seinfeld as a quintessentially Jewish mode of wry humor.
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Midrash as Filter
Apr 18, 2011 By Abigail Treu | Commentary | Text Study | Pesah
From sensual poetry to rules and penalties: how did that happen?
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