Shoftim 2024
Of course there is much to be concerned about in this narrative of a people being organized to occupy. But as I was getting ready to lean into this parshah I happened also to be reading a very strange — and not entirely linear — piece of writing that challenges me to be provoked by a whole different set of concerns than the ones that usually arise when I encounter this colonialist language.
Mattot/Masei
Let’s do some crazy stuff here: our sixth aliyah speaks of the six cities of refuge — arei ha-miklat — to which manslaughterers can run to avoid vengeance.
Bilhah and Zilpah
For a long time Margaret has been including Bilha and Zilpa in the Amidah along with our foremothers Sarah Rebecca Rachel and Leah. Sarah was the mother of Isaac, Rebecca was the mother of Jacob and Esau, and Rachel, Leah, Bilha and Zilpa were the mothers of the twelve sons of Jacob, the progenitors of the twelve tribes of Israel and one daughter, Deena. I’ve always wondered why traditionally we only consider Rachel and Leah the mothers of the twelve sons and one daughter. Rachel and Leah are some of the most popular names for girls. Haven’t met a Bilha or a Zilpa. So what’s the story? I’ve always wondered about this. This week’s parsha identifies Bilha and Zilpa as the mothers of the four sons Dan, Naphtali, Gad and Asher.
Parshat Yitro
Yitro is the blockbuster parsha and actually the subject of a classic movie starring Charleton Heston as Moses called the Ten Commandments made in 1956 directed by Cecil B Demille. It’s probably the most dramatic and of course among the most important parshas in the Torah so why is it called Yitro and not Aseret Ha’Dibrot (10 Commandments), Hukkim (laws), Matan Torah (giving of the Torah)- you get the idea.
Parshat Shoftim
As an instructor at two community colleges I’ve been confronted intensely and quickly with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its use by students. Are the students cheating using this tool, is it enhancing their learning experience, and how will AI become part of all our lives? So, to understand it better, I’ve begun exploring AI myself so I submitted interpretation of this parsha to Chat GPT and you’ll see the difference between a machine driven mind vs. a human driven mind.
Parshat Balak
Today’s Torah Portion is especially meaningful to me, because it was the portion I read for my Bat Mitzvah 9 years ago. As I began to refamilirize myself with the text I realized how much I have changed. The way I interact with the portion and the guidance I receive from it are much different.
Hol Ha-Moed Pesach
Last Friday night before Pesach Adina was laughing about the funny Pesach contradiction of taking matzah, which is supposed to be flat and simple and poor, grinding it up, mixing it with beaten egg whites and sugar and nuts, putting jam between the layers and chocolate glaze on top and turning it into the most delicious, and specifically the tallest, cakes possible. And then she stopped herself and said something like, “Well isn’t that a good idea, actually? Taking the bread of affliction and making something beautiful out of it?”
Shemini 2024
When I was a baby rabbinical student back in ancient days I gave a sermon (that’s what we called them then — the word drash hadn’t yet been invented) about the Tent of Meeting. I don’t remember what parshah - oops, I mean Torah portion — I was sermonizing about. But I talked about how Moses always placed his tent between the huge encampment of the Israelites and the ohel moed. It’s as though he wanted to live somewhere between the community and God. Moses, I said then, was the existential man, a solitary: not quite part of God but not quite part of the people either. He was, to borrow a beautiful phrase that Rav Soloveichik used for Adam, “the lonely man of faith.”
Parshat Va’yikra
When I was 13 years old many many years ago I was bat mitzvah. This is a coming-of-age ceremony for Jewish children. The ceremony took place in Connecticut where I grew up. Allusions to where I live now are to Mendocino California. 13-year-olds are given a portion of the Torah to learn and to read in Hebrew. My portion was Va’yikra, the first five chapters of Leviticus in the Old Testament.
Using Poetry To Evoke God
Back in the short moment when I was a philosophy major in college I think I whacked my way through a little bit of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophus. (Knowing me I probably read the back cover and winged it from there…) For a guy who wrote about language he was sure hard to read! But what I think he might have said is that language is an agreement between people: you see this thing and call it a table. I see the same thing and also call it a table. So when I hear you say “table” that picture is what arises in my mind too. I may think of my mother’s dining table when you say “table. You may think of your mother’s dining table when I say “table.” But we both have a general sense of what is meant by the word, enough that we can have a conversation about setting this table that’s in front of us.
Manna in the Desert
This Shabbes is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It follows by a day the provisional determination of the International Court of Justice of the United Nations that Israel may be committing, or on the way to committing, genocide in Gaza. And it is Shabbat Shirah, the Shabbat of Song, the Shabbat of deliverance, the Shabbat of Mi Chamocha. Oh what a frightening, saddening time to offer up songs of praise!
Joseph the Dreamer
Our friend Joseph is a dreamer — we know that from our first meeting with him. He announces to his brothers: “Hear, if you please, this dream which I dreamt: Behold! we were binding sheaves in the middle of the field, when, behold! — your sheaves gathered around and bowed down to my sheaf.” (37:6-8)
Yom Kippur 2023 : The Wandering Jews
I wasn’t born in the state that I grew up in. Neither of my parents was born in the state where I was born, nor the different state where my siblings and I grew up. Two of my grandparents weren’t born in the country where my parents and sibs and I live. I have no idea where anyone came from a generation or two before them.
Rosh Hashana 2023 : What if God loves us?
One early morning in October of 2021, at the beginning of my sabbatical — before I broke my arm, before our sweet dog and then my beloved Mickey both died — I had a dream. Years before this dream, out of the blue one day, I had received in the mail a book from an old friend of mine, the book Inner Work by the psychoanalyst Robert Johnson. It is about interpreting and learning from dreams. When I first received the book I tried to read it and got nowhere. I tucked it away on a shelf. Then all these years later, in the wake of this dream, I found the book, and this time it was just the key I needed. The specifics of my dream are my own personal iconography. But what I discerned from applying Robert Johnson’s methodology to it was that it was a dream about God: God smiling at me with pure love and fondness, God delighting in my presence.
The Lonely Doll
One day when I was seven or eight years old I went down the street and knocked on the door of a neighbor girl, Janice. Janice was my age, but we went to different schools. She was a beautiful girl, with straight blond hair and a cool countenance. I remember seeing the book The Lonely Doll, and on the cover was a picture of a porcelain doll that I thought looked like Janice. She was an only child, which to me meant that she had a perfect life of ease and order. And she was mean.
God’s Nose Loves the Aroma of the Sacred BBQ
When I returned to Parsah Pinchas this year, I was intrigued, once again, by the recurring images of the sacrifices burning on the altar as being “pleasing to God’, (re-ah n-hoah, a phrase repeated over and over, elsewhere in Torah)...inferring that God has a physicality, a Divine Nose, perhaps, to be able to smell the intense aromas of the daily korbanot.
Living in two-civilization houses
Most of you know my house. But I wonder how many of you knew it before Mickey and I bought it? It was hand-built by Harriet Bye and her then-husband in 1971. It had and still has some excellent vintage hippie architectural touches: a couple of hexagonal windows, a telephone pole as a support stanchion, two-by-fours laid on end to form the ceiling of the bedroom and the floor of the loft above. That little peaked arch into the kitchen —the house ended there, with a pair of sliding doors into the back yard. The original kitchen was a countertop underneath the window that has the pink and gold stained glass border. There was a sink there and a little stove. The room was dark wood-paneled, and there had been a fire in there, so much of the front wall was blackened. The yard was quite overgrown — so much so that when we took down a big rockrose we found a swing set buried in the branches. More interestingly, for some years after we moved in, whenever we would dig in the yard we would unearth stuff — toys, a ball, a spoon, one time a plaster buddha. When we bought it, the house was half the size it is now. We built on the present kitchen and bedroom, in the style of many Mendo houses — the original half charming old hippie handcraft, the add-on all square angles, formica and sheetrock walls.
Memory and Midrash
In October my close friend of over 40 years died unexpectedly. After burying her and starting to deal with her estate, I realized that along with all Sue’s property I had inherited Auntie Bea’s silver Shabbat candlesticks. Many of us have an Auntie Bea, a family matriarch who looms larger than life in our childhoods and continues to dispense largesse until they die. Mine was Aunt Vera, Sue had Auntie Bea. I remembered the candlesticks well, they looked exactly like Joan’s and Bea Matlin’s (though Bea’s were brass). Sue’s Friday night candle lighting was usually at my house, with my candlesticks, and Auntie Bea’s candlesticks eventually disappeared from her fireplace mantle. As I packed and deconstructed Sue’s household, I looked for Auntie Bea’s candlesticks, visualizing them out of retirement and lit once again at my Shabbat table. It literally wasn’t until the last day, in the very last closet on the bottom of a stack that I found the box labeled “candlesticks”, and there, finally, I found Auntie Bea’s silver candlesticks. And they were totally and completely different than how I remembered them. I mean, totally.
Yom kippur 2022 : We stand ready
Al chet sh’chatanu l’faneicha… For the sin which we have sinned before You… Someone always asks: why do we confess in the plural? We know the answer in our bones: because we are plural.
Rosh Hashana 2022:Nothing so whole as a broken heart
I stand before you tonight with a broken heart. A year ago when I chanted, “On Rosh Hashana it is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed, who shall live and who shall die…” never in a million years did I imagine that at the next Rosh Hashana I would look out and Mickey Chalfin wouldn’t be in the front row — my sweet, beautiful, funny Mickey, who loved what and who he loved so much — whether it was Bob Dylan or a chocolate malt or Pulga or this beautiful community or al achat kamma v’chamma — as in the minor case so much more so in the major case — me. My heart is torn open. I am bereft.