My Summer of Remembering
With my mother's death earlier this summer, I've become my family's "Keeper of the Yahrzeit List." So, while some of my friends may be having a summer to remember, I seem to be having a summer of remembering.
Galilee Diary: An evening in Levinsky Park
by Marc Rosenstein
(Originally published in Ten Minutes of Torah and Galilee Diary)
Galilee Diary: Pilgrims
by Marc Rosenstein
(Originally published in Ten Minutes of Torah and Galilee Diary)
Galilee Diary: Red hot chile peppers
...We remember the fish that we used to eat free in Egypt, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic. Now our gullets are shriveled. There is nothing at all! Nothing but this manna...
-Numbers 11:4-6
Galilee Diary: Summer holiday
It was forbidden to allow the posthumous destruction of Man, God, and - this even for the most secularist of Jews - that hope without which a Jew cannot live, the hope which is the gift of Judaism to all humanity.
Galilee Diary: Summer holiday II
...Zebulun did not dispossess the inhabitants of Kitron or the inhabitants of Nahalol; so the Canaanites dwelt in their midst, but they were subjected to forced labor.
Galilee Diary: Independence Day II
If you will it, it will not remain just a dream.
-Theodor Herzl
So I had a little too much to drink at the Independence Day picnic and my head was spinning so I lay down on the grass for a minute…
Our Job is to Prevent Gun Violence
The utter horror of the murderous shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut remains in all of our minds and has rightly propelled us into a critical dialogue that we hope will produce real action after so many years. And the problem has been with us for many years. Much of the time, families and communities – especially in our inner cities – have fought on the front lines against gun violence without much attention from the rest of society. Now, with the alarming and increasing regularity of mass shootings – every couple of years it seems – like those in Newtown and Aurora, it should be clear to all of us that gun violence is our collective problem as a nation, and must be addressed in all of its forms.
Simultaneous Joy and Pain: The Wisdom of the Counting of the Omer
This year at our Passover seder, I experienced something deeply powerful which I had not felt in the context of Passover before.
On Jewish Unity
I met him on my flight back to Boston from Atlanta. He was a Muslim student from Dubai, I was a Jewish student from the United States. We had come from very different places but were on our way to the same university.