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The Muscle Esau Never Built

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Thoughts on Parashat Toldot 5786

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.[…]

Death and Legacy in a Secular Age

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Thoughts on Parashat Chayei Sarah 5786

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).[…]

Andrea Strongwater’s Lost Synagogues of Europe

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Paintings and Histories

Lost Synagogues of Europe recreates in vivid color paintings and chronicles the life stories of nearly eighty majestic— and destroyed— European synagogues, each one a testament to the approximately 17,000 synagogues decimated during the Third Reich and early takeover of the Communist regimes. After WWII only about 3,300 buildings remained standing, and just 700+ are still in use as synagogues. This exquisite and significant work of historical preservation collects, organizes, and documents their stories.

Freighted Legacies has invited Andrea Strongwater to focus on the synagogues in the Polish Lands which include close to 20 locations. The imagination is drawn into a reflection of the missing material culture of Jewish life.[…]