B'rukhim Haba'im! Navigate by parashah or festival by using the sidebar (top left).


  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Torah: A Love Story in Verse

Today is a day of many a first  For trying new tricks, with some trust  Which is why, you will see, that this speech is in verse For I was told, a new thing is a must.  So please excuse if it’s clumsy Please excuse if I slip Understand that I’m just not well-trained I will try not to mumble I will try not to trip I have no expertise here to claim. But beyond my own wish to take part in this tryst  Of new things with some nerves and some glory  This is the perfect portion   for poetic distortion To tell Torah as an epic love story.  Now this may sound strange, but I swear it sincere  That with heart and with ear just refined The whole Torah can seem to an eye that is keen As a romance with the Divine. It has love, it has loss; it has drama, intrigue, It has character growth and deceit, It has pain, it has hope, it has sadness and glee So hold on to the edge of your seat.  Here we are, here today, at the scene of Sinai At what mig
Read more

Tumah, Taharah, and Torah as Fire - Parashat Tazria

Image
The concepts of tumah and taharah , ritual impurity and purity, can sound uncomfortable to our modern ears. They sound to many of us like ‘bad’ and ‘good’. It is bad to be impure; it is good to be pure. However, there’s something a little more complex than that in the Torah’s concepts of tumah and taharah . I will remind you, for example, that contact with a dead body brings a person into a state of tumah , of ritual impurity - and it is a mitzvah, a religious obligation, to care for the deceased. Therefore, it cannot be the case that tumah (ritual impurity) is bad and taharah (ritual purity) is good. So what are these categories for, if not distinguishing the good from the bad? This week’s parashah has been concerned with two experiences that bring an individual from a state of taharah (ritual purity) into a state of tumah (ritual impurity): tzara’at, the mysterious skin affliction, and childbirth. The Torah does not tell us what these people have in common, but it becomes clear
Read more

Tazria: Staying Outside the Temple Gates

Image
  Staying Outside the Temple Gates This week, I have spent time with two women whose thoughts and ideas are permeating my experience of our Torah portion. The first, Kerry, has been my best friend since before we can remember. Kerry is now Doctor Kerry, and her field of medicine is paediatrics. She spends her days (and often nights) in the NICU - the neonatal (or newborn) intensive care unit. Kerry’s babies are often just a couple of pounds, dwarfed in comparison to full-term newborns, and facing the fight for their lives. The second of these women is Rabbi Debbie Young-Somers, my guest in the Salon last week. Rabbi Debbie joined us to talk about the Wellspring Project, the building of a centre of wellbeing with mikveh - waters for ritual immersion - at its heart. Mikveh is not commonly used outside of the orthodox world anymore, with the exception of conversion to Judaism. The reasons for this are varied, but are mostly related to two things: off-putting experiences in orthodox mikva’
Read more