FOSTERING A VIBRANT RENEWAL OF JUDAISM IN POLAND
This week’s Torah portion, Emor, describes the requirements that the priests who served in the Temple were supposed to meet. These expectations stemmed from the role the priests played in serving the Eternal: [perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]They shall be holy unto their God, and not profane the name of their God; […]
Our parasha for this week talks about one puzzling feature of the ancient Yom Kippur ritual: the sending of the “scapegoat” to Azazel.
Aaron shall take the two he-goats and let them stand before יהוה at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting; and he shall place lots upon the two goats, one marked for יהוה and the other marked for Azazel. Aaron shall bring forward the goat designated by lot for יהוה, which he is to offer as a sin offering; while the goat designated by lot for Azazel shall be left standing alive before יהוה, to make expiation with it and to send it off to the wilderness for Azazel.[…]
As a student rabbi, once a month I visited a small Jewish community in Germany. My responsibilities there included leading Sunday school activities for children. One day, a week before my next scheduled visit, the chair of the community sent me an email. She suggested that I could liven things up at the Sunday school […]
What is God? Who is God? One way to answer these questions is to try to draw the boundaries of the so-called divine reality, as something that goes beyond the reality perceived by our senses, as something whose existence we only intuitively sense and which explains and gives meaning to our experiences. We can start from there. We can also do a contextual analysis of the concept of God in the various scriptures in which it occurs and thus try to approximate who God is. Even though the second approach seems more ‘objective’ it is not:[…]
There are basically two opposite attitudes human beings can adopt towards their existence: a deep humility towards the infinity of the universe and the infinite complexity of human life, as well as the position of arrogance – a position of ‘solipsistic narcissism’ where everything, including other human beings, is treated as an object that has been created only to serve us and our ventures. The vast majority of people live somewhere between these two extremes; at one end of this spectrum live the saints, on the other – sociopaths and psychopaths.[…]
The revelation at Sinai has already taken place, the construction of the Tent of Assembly has just come to an end. The Book of Leviticus begins at a time when the theological and material foundations of the religion professed before the newly liberated Israelites from Egypt had just been laid. Therefore, the parshah we are […]
