On the night of September 27, we celebrated Simchat Torah by unrolling the entire Torah while we consecrated our kindergarten and first grade students, officially welcoming them into their Jewish learning. We read the very end and very beginning of our ancient text.
As we welcomed 5782 and celebrated the New Year with joy on Tuesday, part of me couldn’t help being sad. Rosh Hashanah was not just the birthday of the world this year, it was also the one year anniversary on the Jewish calendar, the yahrtzeit, of the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And we need her voice now more than ever.
This week’s parsha is in Deuteronomy. Throughout Deuteronomy, Moishe is preparing the Israelites to prepare to move into the real world of the promised land, ending their purely spiritual life in the wilderness. Many of the mitzvahs in Deuteronomy pertain to the real world, about everyday life and making a living. G-d wants us to be in the real world.
When Haim Gabbai was 10 in wartime Morocco, his father was taken by force from the family home in Marrakesh and sent to a forced labor camp. A few months later, his father returned. He was ill, thin and had lost all his hair. The conditions in the camp had been atrocious.
This week’s parsha is in Deuteronomy. Throughout Deuteronomy, Moishe is preparing the Israelites to prepare to move into the real world of the promised land, ending their purely spiritual life in the wilderness. Many of the mitzvahs in Deuteronomy pertain to the real world, about everyday life and making a living. G-d wants us to be in the real world.
Buckle your seatbelts; we’re heading in.
With the arrival of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish world is being thrown headlong into the leap year of 5782.
Deuteronomy Chapter 28, verse 6 was a promise to the Israelites if they followed divine commandments and remained on the path established for them in the Torah.
Life is a brief state, distinguished from non-living substances as having the capacity for growth, the ability to get and use energy, and to reproduce.
By David M. Glickman
Senior Rabbi of Congregation Beth Shalom
This article first appeared in the Times of Israel
In a column in Tablet Magazine, Liel Leibovitz scolds rabbis and synagogue boards who limit synagogue attendance during this second year of Covid High Holidays.
One of Eliana’s current favorite activities is to cut colored construction paper into pieces and then glue those pieces back together. The first time she did it, I was very confused. I almost stopped her. Then I realized she was taking something plain and turning it into something even more beautiful. After watching her do this a few times, she reminded me that sometimes we need to break something apart before we can make it whole again. This action is exactly what we are all doing as we prepare to enter the High Holy Days.
