Friends of Jewish Renewal in Poland
Our parasha for this week tells one of the most famous of Biblical stories – the story of the Israelite betrayal – the story of the Golden Calf. Impatient Israelites couldn’t wait any longer for Moses’ comeback from Mount Sinai, to the extent that they lost the hope that he would ever come back to them, so they decided to take the matters in their own hand.[…]
Within the last few days The Jerusalem Post, as well as several other media outlets, covered a report, presented by the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel, that analyzes confidential and public testimonies, eye-witness accounts, and interviews with victims, first responders and witnesses. It was sent to “decision-makers” in the United Nations to leave “no room for denial or disregard”. The report analyzes numerous testimonies from the October 7 massacre specifically relating to Hamas’s sexual violence revealed that families and friends were forced by Hamas terrorists to watch their loved ones be raped and sexually assaulted at gunpoint. […] “The terrorist organization Hamas chose to harm Israel strategically in two clear[…]
Humans are social animals. Society is not just a group of atomized human individuals, it is also, if not primarily, a deep structure of relationships between these individuals – biological, social, political and cultural relationships. If this structure is harmed (which can happen for many, often unforeseen, reasons) human societies go through crisis, if it’s destroyed – societies fall apart.[…]
Our tradition does not see the essence of miracles in their supernatural character. This is a Greek-Christian concept that is debated (which does not mean “accepted”) in the rabbinical literature of the Middle Ages, in the writings of philosophers such as Maimonides and Rabbeinu Bachya. It happened due to the reception of Greek philosophy that occurred through the works of Arab philosophers of the 10th-12th centuries and Arabic translations of the works of ancient philosophers. It is so because neither the Hebrew Bible nor the Talmud knows the concept of ‘nature’ or[…]
