By Rabbi Barry H. Block
JTA
In “The Social Justice Torah Commentary,” Rabbi Brian Stoller describes a turtle-shaped dinner bell that his great-grandmother used to summon a Black butler to attend to her needs at the family’s Shabbat table.
Dara Horn’s People Love Dead Jews: Tales from a Haunted Present is the book that launched a thousand Jewish podcasts.
Every home needs a kitchen, especially a Jewish home. The kitchen might serve as a back-end facility while the entertaining and festivities occur in the dining area, but no one disputes the centrality of a well-appointed kitchen to a functioning home.
According to the biblical narrative (Genesis 23), Jewish history in the Land of Israel began in Hebron when Abraham, needing a burial site for Sarah, purchased the Machpelah cave from Ephron the Hittite.
All the Hebrew months rushed into their classroom, just as the New Year was off to a start. They couldn’t help but kibbitz before class began. Quickly their kibbitzing turned to banter and a bit of bickering.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent a secret plea to Adolf Hitler in the summer of 1936, according to newly uncovered documents.
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.
