Rabbi Daniel Bouskila: Sephardic Torah

Who will be left to pray
gratitude for the body
of our planet
if currents fail?

Rabbi Rachel Barenblat: confluence of climate grief and raging anti-semitism

Who will be left to pray
gratitude for the body
of our planet
if currents fail?

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, z/l: Bechukotai The Rejection of Rejection

Rabbi Sacks describes the last parashah of Leviticus as a “rejection of rejection”. In this, he reminds us to the original basis for much of the anti-Semitic history of our civilization—that God rejected the Jews—Abraham’s physical descendants—for Christians—Abraham’s spiritual descendants. He quotes Lev. 26:44-45, which states that God will not cast away His people, nor break His covenant with them.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, z/l: Parashat Behar Minority Rights

Rabbi Sacks observes that while the Torah commands us once to love our neighbor, it commands us 36 times to love the stranger. The obligation to the ger includes the right to live in the Holy Land and the right to share in its welfare provisions. This is an ancient law, way before the Talmudic principles of charity and care to non-Jews as well as Jews.

Rabbi Deena Cowans: Parashat Emor Parashat Emor and Disability Justice

Rabbi Cowans addresses the conflict over the different standards for people with “normative” bodies and people with “other” bodies, and how the text seems discriminatory and ableist. She raises the concept that sacrificial work in the Temple was physically challenging. However, she asks, ‘why shouldn’t the Torah be more inclusive?’ She continues to say that “the messianic future is not one without disability. It is one where inclusion is innate.”

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, z/l: Parashat Emor The Duality of Jewish Time

Holiness of time is the key essence of Emor in its list of festivals and holy days. Rabbi Sacks reminds us that the first thing God declared holy was a day: Shabbat. The first mitzvah was the command to sanctify time. The Prophets were the first people in history to see time itself “as the arena of the Divine-human encounter”. Rabbi Sacks continues to address the myriad was in which the holiness of time forms an essential aspect of Judaism.