The Liberated Bird: Let’s Talk Turkey
Apr 17, 2015 By Anne Lapidus Lerner | Commentary | Shemini
The main course at my Thanksgiving dinner—and perhaps at yours as well—is determined by a few verses in this week’s parashah, Shemini. After all, Leviticus 11 defines which living things are fit for kosher consumption, granting it a major impact on the Thanksgiving menu of kosher aviavores.
Read More
The Fortitude of the Jewish Soul
Dec 15, 2001 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Miketz | Hanukkah
This year I will not be celebrating Hanukkah at home. I’m off to Israel on December 6, and will not be back till the seventh day of the festival, just in time to light a full complement of eight candles on the last night in the midst of family. It is hard to capture the beauty of this holiday or any other on your own. Neither synagogue nor prayer begins to exhaust the repertoire of ritual that enlivens the distinctive character of every Jewish holy day. The home is the great aquifer of our Judaism, indispensable but undervalued.
Read More
Revelation or Interpretation?
Dec 30, 2000 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Miketz
The Rabbis tend to curb the revelatory role of dreams. As a vehicle of extrasensory perception, they would contend, dreams tell us more about what’s on our mind than on God’s. In the early third century, R. Yonatan, a first generation Palestinian Amora, delivered an opinion worthy of Freud: “Dreams convey to us only that which we are already thinking about during the day.” He based himself on a careful reading of the experience of Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian conqueror of Jerusalem in 587 B.C.E. According to the book of Daniel, the king, like most of us, had forgotten his dream by the time he awoke. But greatly agitated by its effect, he demanded of the sages of his realm to recover the dream and then interpret it, a task which threw them into consternation. The exiled Jewish courtier, Daniel, however, with God’s help, met the challenge.
Read More
Memory and Reconciliation
Dec 11, 1999 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Miketz
What ought to be the role of memory in our lives is the conundrum that lies at the heart of this week’s parasha. Just how much of our experience is retained by us, or should be? Is mental health better served by remembering or forgetting? How deep must we dredge into the sediment of our minds to retain or regain the ability to function? A recent study of women on welfare, immune to the prescriptions of tough love, showed how many were once the victims of constant child abuse, which left untreated, impaired them for life. They needed to be healed before they could be restored to the work force. In the narrative form the Torah takes up this subject subtly but profoundly.
Read More
“By Spirit Alone”
Dec 19, 1998 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Miketz | Hanukkah
Judaism shuns the celebration of military victory. The conquest of Canaan by Joshua was never transmuted into a holy day. Passover commemorates our redemption from Egypt; Shavuot, the giving of the Torah at Sinai; Tisha B’Av, the destruction of the Temples; but the demolition of Jericho by Joshua or the final achievement of sovereignty with the erection of the national shrine at Shiloh (Joshua 18:1) find no place in the religious calendar of Judaism.
Read More
The Potential of Tiny Things
Dec 27, 1997 By Joseph Lukinsky (<em>z”l</em>) | Commentary | Miketz | Hanukkah
Every time you eat a latke or a sufganiah (jelly doughnut in Israel) during Hanukkah, you are reenacting the miracle of the cruse of oil that the Maccabees found when they struggled to rededicate the Temple. There was only enough oil for one day, but it lasted for eight! A little oil goes a long way!
Read More
The Burden of Peoplehood
Dec 4, 1994 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Miketz | Hanukkah
Sold into slavery at the age of 17, Joseph attained the post of vizier of Egypt by the time he was 30. That would have been a remarkable feat by a native; for a foreigner, it simply boggles the mind. Only Pharaoh stood between him and absolute power. Joseph had deciphered Pharaoh’s premonition of catastrophe and urged decisive action on a national scale. And Pharaoh rewarded the messenger by appointing him to carry out his own counsel. He also bestowed upon him all the trappings of power, including an arranged marriage with the daughter of an Egyptian priest.
Read More
Varieties of Devotion
Dec 4, 2004 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Vayeshev
This past week, my two-and-a-half year old granddaughter spotted me one morning davening by the window in our living room. She recognized the telltale signs of the act, my tallit and tefillin. Spontaneously, she announced her intention to daven also, took herself over to the drawer where we keep some old JTS benchers (small grace books), removed one, and proceeded to strut about with the bencher in her face. Later, I found the bencher on the floor in another room, but for a few tender moments at least, I had a precious soul mate in greeting God that morning.
Read More
