FOSTERING A VIBRANT RENEWAL OF JUDAISM IN POLAND
Lech Lecha – God speaks to Abram, commanding him, “Go from your land, from your birthplace and from your father’s house, to the land which I will show you.” Then God promises him that he will be made into a great nation. Abram and his wife, Sarai, accompanied by his nephew Lot, journey to the land of Canaan. But a famine forces him to depart for Egypt, where his beautiful Sarai is taken to Pharaoh’s palace[…]
Why do we read the Book of Kohelet, the most ‘existentialist’ book of the Hebrew Bible, on Sukkot – the most joyous among the Jewish holidays? It seems to contradict the spirit of Sukkot! Did the rabbis want to put limits on our joy and happiness? Were they afraid that we might have become too happy? That’s exactly one of the (many) answers! Rabbi Azaryah Figo (1579-1647) in his Binah L’itim (published in Venice in 1648) connects the[…]
How much control did we have over the world when we were children? Very little. The whole process of growing up, learning and so called socialization is about gaining control over our own behavior and the close environment that surrounds us. Over time we gain more and more control over ourselves and our close environment; this makes us able to create small worlds of our own, like our own family, our own business or any kind of structure, like an organization or a religious community. In this way we change the world and participate in the process of its creation.[…]
God sends us messages and gives signals that He is taking care of us. But He will not “break into our homes” and our life uninvited. In this way God is more loving than just. There are times when we feel His presence very close but there are also times God seems very distant. The latter feeling has one of its expressions in our parasha for this week:[…]
What do we celebrate on Rosh Hashanah? A pretty common answer given to that question is: we celebrate the creation of the world. This answer is generally correct but there is more to it. Midrash (Vayikra Rabbah 29:1) tells us that the world was actually created on the 25th of Elul. On Rosh Hashanah human beings were created. The midrash gives us a precise chronology – hour by hour – what happened on that day and a lot happened on that day: God created[…]
Blessings… What are they? Every blessing, at its core, is a form of prayer, since it typically asks God to help accomplish what we ourselves cannot. Yet the blessing is more than prayer because it assigns a decisive role to the one who pronounces it. Let us consider, for example, the blessings of children made by their parents: placing hands on them in the solemn act in which the parents see themselves as God’s co-workers and as essential links between the[…]
