Ki Teitzei: When You Go Out as a Warrior
Parashat Ki Teitzei includes a rich and varied collection of directives that serve as a partial blueprint for behaviors and norms to create the emerging covenantal culture. As Professor Adele Berlin notes, “Issues pertaining to women are prominent in this parashah. . . .
To Delight in Life
This week's Torah portion presents a seemingly endless litany of blessings and curses. These blessings and curses seem to follow a simple equation: follow God's commands and you will receive blessing; ignore or transgress them and you will receive curses.
Standing Together, Standing Apart
The Hebrew month of Elul invites us into a period of preparatory self-reflection and contemplation, calling us to center our thoughts on our own t'shuvah.
Standing Together, Standing Apart
The Hebrew month of Elul invites us into a period of preparatory self-reflection and contemplation, calling us to center our thoughts on our own t'shuvah.
Moses’s Last Lecture
Give ear, O heavens, let me speak;
Let the earth hear the words I utter!
May my discourse come down as the rain,
My speech distill as the dew,
Like showers on young growth,
Like droplets on the grass.
(Deuteronomy 32:1-2)
Ki Tavo: What Is Success?
"Success" is a song sung by the immigrant Jew, Tateh, in the Broadway play Ragtime. In the song, a father sings to his young daughter that "hope is in the air." They have journeyed to America, the new Promised Land, so that he can give his daughter a better life.
Strange Fruit
After seeing the infamous 1930 photograph by Lawrence Beitler, which depicts the mob lynching of two young black men, a Jewish high school teacher named Abel Meeropol wrote a haunting poem titled "Strange Fruit." The poem was first published in 1936 in The New York Teacher, a union magaz
The Fugitive Aramean and You
". . . My father was a fugitive Aramean. He went down to Egypt with meager numbers and sojourned there; but there he became a great and very populous nation" (Deuteronomy 26:5).
Dealing with Our Terrors
Focal Point
The life you face shall be precarious; you shall be in terror, night and day, with no assurance of survival. (Deuteronomy 28:66)
Feeling Grateful-And Doing Something About It
Focal Point
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When you enter the land that the Eternal your God is giving you as a heritage, and you possess it and settle in it, you shall take some of every first fruit of the soil, which you harvest from the land that the Eternal your God is givi