Rabbi Natasha Mann

  Mosaic from the Abbey Church of the Dormition in Jerusalem           There is a story about a mistake made in Latin, in a Catholic mass, in the 16th Century. The story is of a priest who, when reciting the mass in Latin for his congregation, got into the bad habit of saying the word mumpsimus instead of sumpsimus . Sumpsimus means “we have taken”. Mumpsimus, on the other hand, doesn’t mean anything at all. Despite being corrected, so goes the story, the priest stubbornly stuck to his mistake. His masses were always conducted with the nonsense word mumpsimus , and he could not be talked out of it.  Now mumpsimus does have a meaning. It means someone who obstinately sticks to their opinion even after being shown that they are wrong.  It is a cute story in part because, at least to most of us, it doesn’t really matter. We’re people who pray in a language which isn’t our mother tongue. Even for native Hebrew speakers, the language of prayer...

This D'var Torah was given to Herzl-Ner Tamid Synagogue, WA, for Parashat Bo, by Rabbinic Intern Natasha Mann. The Paradigm of the Self I used to have a great answer for the question, ‘So why do you want to be a rabbi?’ None of you have ever heard that answer, but I promise you, it was a good one. It was funny, and it was polished; it had a story about my home rabbi, and a story about my college friends, and it was always met with a smile. And somewhere between my beginning to craft that response and making it so good, it stopped being true. Because I changed, and the response didn’t. That’s why, when any of you have asked why I want to be a rabbi, I stumble through a response that I refuse to prepare in advance. It turns out that my slow, frowning response filled with ‘um’s and ‘wait, let me say that a different way’ is much more true to reality. So why did it take me so many years of retelling the same story to realise that it wasn’t true? The human brain loves narrat...

This short D'var Torah was given to Herzl-Ner Tamid Synagogue, WA, for Parashat Bo by Rabbinic Intern Natasha Mann. Seeing God in Pharaoh The biggest disservice that the classical rabbis did to our tradition was to demonise some biblical characters and make others into saints. The most obvious and painful example to me is that they demonised Eisav (Esau), whose most significant action was one of profound forgiveness, and they turned lying, cheating Ya’akov into a saint. It’s a disservice because lying, cheating Ya’akov is an interesting character with a tremendous amount of character growth, and the saintly version which the rabbis insist upon makes very little sense at all. Pharaoh is easily the most despicable character in the Torah. There’s no need to demonise Pharaoh beyond the biblical account. After all, among Pharaoh’s sins are slavery and mass infanticide. And yet the opening line of this week’s parashah should give you pause. The opening line is God saying to ...