Ritual in Our Lives
Sep 20, 2002 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Sukkot
When I was a youngster growing up in small-town America in the 1940s, the only sukkah in town stood behind the synagogue. It did service for the entire congregation. Even my father, the rabbi of our Conservative synagogue and devoutly observant, never seemed to entertain the idea of putting up a sukkah in our backyard. In those days, people had less time for domestic rituals and shied away from any public display of their Jewishness. The synagogue in Pottstown, a large, handsome, basilican structure on the main street, had become the last arena of individual and collective Jewish expression.
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Pesah vs. Easter
Apr 19, 2003 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Pesah
The overlapping this year of Easter and Passover, of the Christian Holy Week with our eight-day celebration of Passover merits attention. Unlike the yoking of Christmas and Hanukkah, Easter and Passover are festivals of equal gravity. Side by side they bring to light the deep structures of both religions.
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Dread of Darkness
Jan 11, 2003 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Bo
Darkness unsettles us. As children we went to sleep with a small light on; as adults we prefer to come home to a dwelling not totally dark. We fear what we cannot see. It is for this reason that we start the evening service with the recitation of a verse from Psalm 78: “But he, the compassionate one, would expiate sin, and not destroy; he would again and again turn back his anger, and would not arouse his full wrath” (v. 38, trans. by Edward J. Greenstein). As the darkness of night envelops us, we affirm God’s nearness. God does not withdraw with the setting of the sun.
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Torah and Jewish Survival
Jan 18, 2003 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Beshallah
We tend to think of revelation as a highly restrictive term. The fate of a revealed text is to be immutable. We humans have no right to alter what God has given. But in Judaism precisely because the Torah is revered as divine, it becomes susceptible to unending interpretation. It would be a denigration of God’s word to saddle it with just a single meaning. In contrast to human speech, which carries a finite range of meanings, the language of God was deemed to be endowed with an infinity of meanings. This theology freed the Rabbis to do midrash, creating the anomaly of a canon without closure. The vessels kept changing their contents. New challenges elicited new insights into a text inviolable only on the surface.
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Stranger in a Foreign Land
Dec 28, 2002 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Shemot
Moses names his first born son Gershom, still a common Hebrew name. The child is born to him and his wife Zipporah in the land of Midian, to which he fled after he murdered an Egyptian taskmaster. We do not hear of Gershom again in the epic, yet his name bears on the destiny of his father and his people. The name consists of two Hebrew words, “ger sham,” meaning “a stranger there.” By bestowing it on his son, Moses stresses the complexity of his own fate: “I have been a stranger in a foreign land” (Exodus 2:22).
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The Tower of Babel
Oct 12, 2002 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Noah
The last mythological fragment we have in the Torah before we come to the figure of Abraham is the Tower of Babel. With this episode the Torah turns its attention from the universal to the particular, from the history of humanity to the descendants of Shem, No·ah’s firstborn son. As preserved, the story is but nine verses — brief, insignificant and unedifying, not much more than a dismissive satire on Babylon. At best, we try to connect this fragment to the mystery of human language. If we are all progeny of No·ah, how did we come to speak so many different languages?
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The Conversion Controversy
Oct 5, 2002 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Bereishit
Conversion is back in the news. During the High-Holy-Day period just ended, a Conservative rabbinic court in Eastern Europe completed the conversion process of eighteen Czech and nineteen Polish converts to Judaism. Some 80 per cent had Jewish roots. All studied formally for at least a full year (many more) and were obliged to be active in their respective Jewish communities. Prior to conversion, the men underwent either a full or symbolic ritual circumcision (if already circumcised), while both men and women went through ritual immersion. Another half-dozen in Prague are on their way to completing the conversion process.
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9/11 in Perspective
Sep 16, 2002 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Yom Kippur
Last year’s assault on America struck less than a week before Rosh Hashanah. With the embers still burning and the air laden with smoke and the taste of ashes in our mouths, we could hardly bring ourselves to wish each other a sweet new year. Suddenly, the shehecheyanu thanksgiving with which we greet each holiday rang with a frightening literalness. Our state of shock was too acute for comforting, like that of a mourner before the funeral.
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