R’eih: Food and Covenant
God blessed the first humans, told them to multiply and increase, and then instructed them: "Look, I have given you all the seed-bearing plants on the face of the earth, and every tree that has in it seed-bearing fruit; these are yours to eat" (Genesis 1:29).
Shof’tim: Breathing New Life into Ancient Teaching
One of the joys of Jewish life in the Land of Israel is the way ancient texts can be used in ordinary moments of daily life. A rabbinic colleague tells the story of a Jerusalem traffic jam: traffic had come to a complete halt, and drivers were leaning on their horns in frustration.
Ki Teitzei: We Are What We Remember
The last paragraph of Ki Teitzei is the maftir reading in non-Reform congregations on the Shabbat before Purim. Its opening word, zachor, "remember," names that Shabbat.
Ki Tavo: The Power of a Story
Long ago, in the days when we were farmers and shepherds in the Land of Israel, the Torah taught us that when we harvested our crops, we were to put the first fruits of our harvest in a basket and bring it as an offering to God.
Haazinu: Nursing Them with Honey from the Rock
I've always thought it curious that it is customary on the holiday of Shavuot to eat foods made of sweet dairy (cheese blintzes, cheesecake, and so on). In all my childhood and adult years, I never heard a reason for this that made sense.
Expanding the Covenant
At the edge of the Promised Land, Moses convenes his people one last time, to draw them into the covenant between them and their God. This great gathering of the masses evokes the last great gathering, forty years earlier, when the people of Israel were encamped at the foot of Mt. Sinai.
Expanding the Covenant
At the edge of the Promised Land, Moses convenes his people one last time, to draw them into the covenant between them and their God. This great gathering of the masses evokes the last great gathering, forty years earlier, when the people of Israel were encamped at the foot of Mt. Sinai.
Learning How to Say “Sorry”
"It's not my fault!"
We've all said it. It's rarely easy to accept responsibility for the mistakes we make or damage we cause. Sometimes we know instantly we've done something wrong; sometimes it takes time for us to realize the extent of our mistake. But even after that realization, it's always painful to say, "I'm sorry."
Finding the Strength to Look Beyond the Horizon
Here's one of the few facts I remember from my high school physics class: Because the surface of the earth is curved, the farthest distance a person can see is about four or five miles. Everything beyond that, even with the best telescope, is obscured from view.
Four to five miles! For some people (not me) that's a short, early morning run. Our vision is so limited! Our perspective is so circumscribed. So much lies beyond our horizons at any given moment.
The same is true in our daily lives. So often we become accustomed repeated patterns and habits of mind that help us tread water, but move us no further. We tacitly accept the idea of inexorable fate — it's our lot to struggle, we can't change it. The weight of the present prevents us from imagining alternative futures. We lose sight of alternatives — of a different world beyond our present circumstances — a world just around the corner, beyond the horizon.
Moses appears to fall victim to the same trap in this week's Torah reading, Parashat B'haalot'cha.
What Happens When We Just See What We Want to See?
On July 2, 2014, the prestigious science journal Nature retracted two heralded papers in the field of stem cell research, papers it had published only a few months earlier. The articles described a revolutionary process called STAP, where biologists subjected mature adult cells to physical stresses and transformed them into stem cells. Yet, in the editorial announcing the papers' retraction, Nature's editors reported that the "data that were an essential part of the authors' claims had been misrepresented" and that the authors' work was marred by "sloppiness" and "selection bias" ("Editorial: STAP retracted," Nature, vol. 511, no. 7507, July 2, 2014). All told, as the journalist Dana Goodyear has written, "a far-reaching and sensational conjecture" was "defeated by flaws that were at best irreparable and at worst unconscionable" ("The Stress Test," The New Yorker, February 29, 2016, pp. 46-57).