Friends of Jewish Renewal in Poland
Let me start our reflection with quoting some laws from our Torah portion:
In the case of a virgin who is engaged to someone —if another man comes upon her in town and lies with her, you shall take the two of them out to the gate of that town and stone them to death: the girl because she did not cry for help in the town, and the man because he violated his neighbor’s wife. Thus you will sweep away evil from your midst.[…]
A week ago I had a dental emergency. My tooth began to hurt, on Thursday evening, just a little, but on Friday, during the day, it began to hurt more and more. I led evening prayers while on strong painkillers. However, they soon stopped working because the pain became unbearable, (8-9 on a scale of 1-10) – so unbearable that I went to the ER in the middle of the night. I spent about 4 hours there and they did basically nothing. If I didn’t ask for local anesthesia at the end, this visit would have been a complete waste of time. Using this local anesthesia again and again I survived till the morning. Then I called about 15, maybe 17 dental clinics and one finally accepted me, despite the fact that they were already booked for the entire day. I scheduled an appointment, the dentist opened my tooth, removed the nerve, applied temporary filling and scheduled root canal treatment in three weeks. I went home. The pain was gone! I spend the rest of Shabbat sleeping in my bed.[…]
A celebrated Orthodox rabbi gets to heaven and an angel takes him to a banquet that has been prepared in his honor. “We will serve you the most tender meat, the juiciest fish, and fragrant wine,” the angel tells him. “But who was the Mashgiach for this meal?” the rabbi asks. “Ah,” says the angel. “In your honor, God was the Mashgiach.” “Thanks,” says the rabbi. “But I’ll just stick with the fish.”[…]
It may be boring to start a d’var Torah again by saying “we live in times of huge societal tensions and disagreements, where everyone is fighting with each other etc”. But it’s true. Was it different one, two, three decades ago? Who knows, some say yes, some say no. We, human beings, have a pretty strong and natural tendency to idealize our past: oh, things were not that wrong in the ‘80s. Oh, the ‘90s was[…]
