Friends of Jewish Renewal in Poland
Let’s set the scene: Yaakov is sitting in a café in Nowy Świat in Warsaw, or perhaps in the Kazimierz district of Kraków. A friend comes over. “Hey Yaakov, jak leci? How’s life?” Yaakov smiles: “Life? It’s wonderful. Good job, kids in excellent schools, Shabbat dinners with friends, holidays in the mountains or by the Baltic… The only thing is, when everything feels this calm and normal, I keep waiting for the antisemitism to flare up again.”[…]
Parashat Toldot… Toldot means “Generations”And if you’re talking about generations… You’re talking about a whole lot of drama. So we have a plot, an unethical plot for many commentators, then the reaction to it – anger, fear, reward, punishment… and some would say that some sort of karma. I will focus only on the beginning of the story today: Jacob, Esau and the birthright takeover. Long story short: Two brothers, Jacob and Esau, started to wrestle with each other already inside their mother’s womb, so violently that she cried. God told her “two nations are struggling within your body, two peoples already divided, the elder destined to serve the younger.” They struggle during their birth; then they grow up and become opposite characters, Esau a rugged, impulsive hunter; Jacob a calm, quiet tent-dweller, a kind of social intellectual.[…]
The opening verse of Parashat Chayei Sarah is stark: “Sarah’s lifetime—the years of Sarah’s life—came to 127 years” (Gen. 23:1). The repetition of “life” is not redundancy; it is reverence. Sarah dies, and the Torah pauses to count every year, as if to say: this life mattered, and its end demands attention. Immediately, Abraham rises to secure a burial place. He does not mourn in abstraction; he acts. He negotiates, pays, and purchases the Cave of Machpelah from Ephron the Hittite for four hundred shekels of silver—full price, publicly weighed, legally binding (Gen. 23:16–18).[…]
How do we say “congratulations” in Hebrew? Mazal tov. What does it mean? Good luck! So when someone gets married what do we say? Good luck! A child is born in a family… What do we say? Good luck… yeah, like we immediately think about all kinds of bad things that can happen.[…]
