This Week’s Torah Portion: Lech L’cha – לָךְ-לְךָ (Genesis 12:1−17:27)
The first commandment to Abraham our father is to go. God appears 10 times to Abraham, seven of them are about going and walking. Jewish law is called Halacha (literally the same as walking). God wants us on the move, not standing in one place. Therefore Jewish tradition is always evolving, always changing, always trying to be relevant to our people!
This Week’s Torah Portion: Noach – נֹחַ (Genesis 6:9−11:32)
“Noah was a righteous man, he walked with God”
What kind of a person knows about a disaster that is about to happen, and does not raise heaven and earth to rescue his neighbors? What kind of a person builds an ark and saves only his family?
The prophet Isaiah calls the flood “Noah’s water” blaming the flood on Noah’s decision not to try and save others! Letting us know we should not be closing ourselves in our Arks when others can use our help.
This Week’s Torah Portion: B’reishit – בְּרֵאשִׁית (Genesis 1:1−6:8)
“In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the earth” – God creates the world, God existed before the world was created and God will continue to exist, even if God forbid we destroy the world.
That is the most important innovation the Hebrew Bible brings about God! God is not dependent on laws of nature, God is beyond the world, God has no sexuality, nor family, nor any other human fixtures, God is the total other than us.
This Week’s Torah Portion: Shabbat Sukkot – שַׁבָּת סֻכֹּת (Exodus 33:12–34:26)
Sukkot is a holiday of Joy “Be joyful at your festival” (Deuteronomy 16:14). The Joy of appreciating all that is good in our lives, the Joy of being in a Sukkah, the Joy of renewal because we are beginning the new year, hoping, and praying it will be so much better than the previous one.
And above all, it is the Joy of the Torah, as we dance and hold the Torah literally close to our hearts, we renew our connection to the covenant God made with us in Sinai, and we rejoice in our tradition, values, and stories, and feel pride and joy with our Jewish roots.
This Week’s Torah Portion: Haazinu – הַאֲזִינוּ (Deuteronomy 32:1–52)
Who is this Moses?
This week’s Torah Portion, Haazinu, presents “The Song of Moses”, a poem of incredible beauty and power, delivered by Moses to the Children of Israel as his final instructions before they set forth into the Promised Land. So striking are its poetic tones that it is written uniquely in the Torah scroll, separated into two small columns of text which flow down the page like the running rhythms of the song.
Who is this Moses?
Wasn’t it Moses who said, when God first called him to lead the People of Israel on this 40 year journey from slavery to freedom: “I have never been a man of words… I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.” Surely, the Song of Moses cannot have been written by the same man who needed the help of his brother Aaron to even speak God’s words. Unless, of course, Moses has grown immensely over the course of these forty years, learning and growing from the experience of raising a new generation of Israel, now ready to enter the Promised Land.
Who are we?
What a wonderful lesson this would be, as we emerge from these High Holy Days. This is the same Moses, he has just grown over time and through experience… and so can we. Now, the question is no longer “Who is this Moses?” but “Who are we?” And who can we yet become?
May these High Holy Days inspire us to become the better self which resides within us all.
This Week’s Torah Portion: Vayeilech – וַיֵּלֶךְ (Deuteronomy 31:1–30)
“Moses wrote down this Torah and gave it to the priests, sons of Levi, who carried the Ark of God’s Covenant, and to all the elders of Israel. And Moses instructed them…you shall read this Torah aloud in the presence of all Israel.” (Deuteronomy 31:9)
This week’s Torah Portion, Vayeilech, contains it’s own D’var Torah. It contains the actual commandment for the Children of Israel to read the words of Torah for all to hear. This is the reason we are here still today. For all our wandering, for all we have lost and all we have learned over these three thousand years and more since Moses spoke these words, the Torah has abided within us and its teachings have kept us strong.
We are today a much different people than our ancestors who stood on the banks of the Jordan river receiving these words of Torah, and yet our values, our culture, and our faith remain – because we have carried the Torah, heard its words and made them our own, in every generation of our people. L’dor vaDor, from generation to generation, may these words of Torah live on – in our lives, and the justice we bring to our world.
This Week’s Torah Portion: Nitzavim – נִצָּבִים (Deuteronomy 29:9–30:20)
This week’s Torah Portion, Atem Nitzavim, begins:
You stand here this day before Adonai your God: you, your leaders, your tribal chiefs, your elders, your magistrates, every man of Israel, your children, your women, and the converts in your camp – from your woodcutters to your drawers of water. All of you have entered into this covenant before Adonai your God… And it is not with you alone that I am making this covenant. I am making it both with those who are standing here with us today before Adonai our God, and with those who are not here with us today.
Having listed every possible member of the community of Israel, the Torah tells us that all had a part in the making of God’s covenant, even those who were not there that day. So, who could the Torah be referring to? Who were the Children of Israel who were “not here today”? The midrash teaches us that the Torah refers here to the generations of Israel yet to come. In other words, the Torah refers here to us.
We, all of us, stood at Sinai that awesome day. We, all of us and the generations yet to come, stood there – along with every generation of our people – as we set our feet upon the path of Torah which has carried us forward even unto this day. We relive this moment each High Holy Days when again we read these words and stand together as one, just as we did once long ago at Sinai, to begin again on the path of Torah, to begin again on the path to the building of a better world.
This year we may not all be able to physically stand together as we read these words, within the sacred walls of our congregation, but this year, as we do every year, all of us, we stand together as one.
This Week’s Torah Portion: Ki Tavo – כִּי-תָבוֹא (Deuteronomy 26:1–29:8)
This week’s Torah Portion, Ki Tavo, contains within it these most mystical of commands:
“Moses and the levitical priests spoke to all Israel, saying: Silence! Hear, O Israel! Today you have become the people of the Eternal your God. Listen to the voice of the Eternal your God and do God’s commandments and laws, which I command you this day. (Deuteronomy 27:9-10)
Israel is command to be silent so that we can listen to the words of God.
There is a midrash, a legend of our people, that God’s voice has spoken the Ten Commandments from the heights of Mount Sinai continually from the first moment of Creation. The miracle of the moment of receiving the Ten Commandments was not that God spoke, but that the People of Israel heard. At that moment of moments, God silenced all the noise. No bird chirped, no cow mooed, God silenced even the sounds within them, so that they could hear the words which had been waiting for them there since the beginning.
Rabbi Arthur Green once taught:
Torah is Eternal, it has existed even before the written word.
So what was Torah before there was language?
A Book filled with silence. A story waiting to be told.
We are a people who, once upon a time, wrote that story we now call Torah.
We are that people still, and with every intention and every deed, we tell that story continually, every day.
This Week’s Torah Portion: Ki Teitzei – כִּי-תֵצֵא (Deuteronomy 21:10–25:19)
And so too shall you do with anything that your fellow loses, and you find: you must not remain indifferent. If you see your fellow’s donkey or ox fallen on the road, do not ignore it; you must help him raise it. (Deuteronomy 22:3-4)
The Torah is trying to help us become who we ought to be: people that do not refrain from helping others. People who do not ignore the messiness of our world!
This Week’s Torah Portion: Shof’tim – שֹׁפְטִים (Deuteronomy 16:18–21:9)
When you approach a town to attack it, you shall offer it terms of Shalom. (Deuteronomy 20:10)
When engaging war, armies always want to surprise the enemy, attack when the enemy is not ready. However, the value of Shalom is much more important than war tactics, we are commended to lose the element of surprise, and to always offer Shalom instead of war.
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