The Shvesters | Eli Eli אֵלִי אֵלִי

Musical Treats

Among the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust was one young woman named Hana Szenes. Already having emigrated from Hungary to the land of Israel, she volunteered to return as a parachutist and aid the British in a special operation to save her landsmen, Hungarian Jews, from deportation to death camps. Hana was caught, tortured, and executed by firing squad. She refused to give up any information to the Nazis. She was 23. This is her poem, A Walk in Caesarea, arranged and performed by The Shvesters and Omri Bar Giora.

Rabbi Lauren Tuchman: Emor The Problem of Embodied Perfection

Torah Sparks

Rabbi Tuchman addresses the challenges with Leviticus 21 from the perspective of a blind rabbi. She states that society tends to claim that individuals with disabilities are no longer impacted by these passages because we have evolved. Yet we have not really evolved. Such individuals are still marginalized. She questions: “are we to assume that a supposed broken body equals a broken person?

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: Emor Eternity and Mortality

Torah Sparks

The laws regarding the condition of tamei are complex and challenging to understand. Rabbi Sacks quotes Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai: “It is not that death defies or the waters purity. Rather, God say, I have ordained a statue and issue a decree and you have no permission to transgress it.” Even the sages didn’t understand the rules. The logic is in the concept of the holy. God is beyond time and space, yet God created them and the physical entities that occupy them.