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 […]

Thoughts on Parashat Shemini

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:[…]

Thoughts on Parashat Tzav

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 […]

Thoughts on Parashat Vayakhel-Pekudei

Our parasha for this week tells us the story of the construction of the tabernacle, the organization of the religious cult and many other aspects related to it. In other words, it tells us about the construction of a holy space in which the Eternal was to dwell among the Israelites. This story and all these descriptions provide an opportunity to pose and answer a fundamental question: what is holiness?[…]

The villages of Svaneti, a mountainous region in the South-West of Georgia, are incredibly picturesque. No wonder – they are perched against a backdrop of snowy peaks of Caucasus, the highest mountain range in Europe. However, this prime location is not their defining feature. What sets them apart from Alpine villages of, say, Austria or […]