ARZA

Sukkot is Zeman Simchatenu- “The Time of our Rejoicing.” We celebrate our bounty even while acknowledging that we are not ultimately in charge. Why else would we dwell in a flimsy booth, with a see-through roof, often times in the cold? We do so to acknowledge that only God can truly provide protection from harm. [...]

Moses concludes his recitation of blessing and curses when instructing what it means to come into the land by telling the people that only today, forty years after their birth as a people, forty years after the wandering in the desert, have they attained a “heart to know, eyes to see and ears to hear”. [...]

Nachamu, Nachamu Ami are the words of Isaiah on the Shabbat following Tisha B’av. “Comfort Ye Comfort Ye Oh My People. “ The Jewish people twice lost our center of gravity, the place from which emanated both religious and political authority; our two temples. Fasting and the reading of Lamentations is the traditional commemoration of [...]

“Twenty years before, Kingscourt and Friedrich, had entered Jerusalem by night and from the west. Now they came by day, approaching from the east. Then she had been a gloomy, dilapidated city; now she was risen in splendor, youthful, alert, risen from death to life.” -Theodor Herzl, Altenueland I thought of this passage often during [...]

Shavuot is traditionally observed through study. Tikkun Leil Shavuot, now with many variations, is a time of learning text throughout the night in order to more fully engage with Jewish law and tradition. Shavuot is linked with Pesach as the next logical step on the path from liberation to sovereignty. That natural link is law, [...]

Zionism is the story of the modern liberation of the Jewish people restored and renewed to our homeland. It is also the story of remarkable individuals who carved a path for the growth of the Jewish State and a flourishing democracy in the Middle East. The leadership of Weitzman, Ben Gurion, Meir, Eban, and others [...]

Many of us, either from the pulpit or around our Shabbat tables, will be thinking out loud about what President Obama said in his State Department speech yesterday, what the news will report on the meeting of Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Obama today, and about our feelings about Israel. One Middle East scholar said [...]

Chag Sameach. Today, we celebrated the newest holiday of the Jewish people- Israel Independence Day. Our efforts to re-establish a Jewish sovereign state are the culmination of nearly 2,000 years of prayers but of just over 100 years of political activism. It is Jewish/Zionist activism more than prayer that was the tipping point allowing for [...]

For centuries we have written our own personal versions of the Pesach Haggadah. We reflect different world views; different religious perspectives, all the while focusing on the retelling of our great liberation from slavery to the freedom of our own sovereignty in the distance. As American Jews we often struggle with the ideas of Zionism [...]

“There is a certain people scattered abroad and dispersed among the peoples….Their laws are different from those of every other people’s, and they do not observe the king’s laws; therefore it is not befitting the king to tolerate them.”       — Haman to the Persian King Achashveros. “With the help of God and the people’s [...]