Beit Polska Blog

By Dr. Halina Postek July 22, 2016/16 Tammuz 5776 – This week’s Torah portion Balak is the only parasha in the entire Torah in which the conveyed events are made known to us not because the Israelites participated in them (they were the ones who witnessed all the other events described in the Torah). Rather, we […]

Parashat Chukat 9th and 10th of Tammuz, 5776; July 15 and 17, 2016 – This week’s Torah portion Chukat (Numbers 19:1 to 21:1) is a rich trove of paradoxical challenges. Understanding this Torah portion led our sages into new depths of textual and conceptual ingenuity. At the center of this Torah portion is the arational ritual of […]

By Dr Halina Postek July 8th, 2016/2nd Tamuz 5776  A year has passed since the Israelites left Egypt. That is enough time to forget the bitterness of slavery, humiliation and persecution. This period of time was long enough for the process of the idealization of the past to begin. Now Egypt seems like a land […]

24th June, 2016/18 Sivan 5776  Moses is confronted by the mob: “If only we had meat to eat!” (Numbers 11:4). This demand comes a little over two years into their sojourn out of slavery. They were encamped at the foot of Mount Sinai until very recently. The journey was recently resumed and the challenges appear. […]

By Rabbi Yoel Kahn, PhD, DD, Congregation Beth El, Berkeley, CA June 11, 2016  This week’s Torah portion begins with precision in time and vagueness in geography. We begin reading this week from the fourth book of the Torah, parshat Bamidbar: The Eternal spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, in the tent of meeting, […]

The day you were born was the day God decided the universe could no longer exist without you. -Rebbe Nachman of Bretzlav This week as the weather warms and we make our way into summer, we also begin a new book of the Torah, Bamidbar, the Book of Numbers. Far from the family stories Genesis, […]