When Haim Gabbai was 10 in wartime Morocco, his father was taken by force from the family home in Marrakesh and sent to a forced labor camp. A few months later, his father returned. He was ill, thin and had lost all his hair. The conditions in the camp had been atrocious.
This week’s parsha is in Deuteronomy. Throughout Deuteronomy, Moishe is preparing the Israelites to prepare to move into the real world of the promised land, ending their purely spiritual life in the wilderness. Many of the mitzvahs in Deuteronomy pertain to the real world, about everyday life and making a living. G-d wants us to be in the real world.
Buckle your seatbelts; we’re heading in.
With the arrival of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish world is being thrown headlong into the leap year of 5782.
Deuteronomy Chapter 28, verse 6 was a promise to the Israelites if they followed divine commandments and remained on the path established for them in the Torah.
Life is a brief state, distinguished from non-living substances as having the capacity for growth, the ability to get and use energy, and to reproduce.
By David M. Glickman
Senior Rabbi of Congregation Beth Shalom
This article first appeared in the Times of Israel
In a column in Tablet Magazine, Liel Leibovitz scolds rabbis and synagogue boards who limit synagogue attendance during this second year of Covid High Holidays.
One of Eliana’s current favorite activities is to cut colored construction paper into pieces and then glue those pieces back together. The first time she did it, I was very confused. I almost stopped her. Then I realized she was taking something plain and turning it into something even more beautiful. After watching her do this a few times, she reminded me that sometimes we need to break something apart before we can make it whole again. This action is exactly what we are all doing as we prepare to enter the High Holy Days.
Achrayut… Responsibility…
I decided to write about the middah of taking responsibility after reading and listening to reports on the rise in the number of cases of the Delta variant. This news has been, and continues to be, alarming and frightening.
I was a writer before I became a rabbi and High Holiday sermons usually come easily to me. Some years I have so many ideas and teachings and hopes to share that I accidentally write more sermons than I need to give.
I was born at the old St. Joseph’s Hospital on Linwood Boulevard and was fortunate to have been reared in an Orthodox Jewish family. When my parents brought me home from the hospital, I stopped breathing eight times and would have died had my father not instinctively thrown me into the air to catch my breath. Who would have thought I’d live this long?
