- Congregation Beth El–Keser Israel
85 Harrison Street, New Haven, CT 06515-1724 | P: 203.389.2108 | office@beki.org
85 Harrison Street, New Haven, CT 06515-1724 | P: 203.389.2108 | office@beki.org
…distributed so that you can see them together, and can compare them. I’ve decided to focus on Isaac’s deception of Abimelech along with the two earlier passages of deception. Abimelech had already been deceived by Abraham in a similar scenario a couple of chapters back. Maybe Abimelech had a memory problem — but then Abimelech may be a dynastic name and the stories really involve two different Kings with the same name. The story in today’s parsha…
…0 Valley of the Leaves $700 The View from Above $1,000 The Book of Life $600 Huppa $2,000 Kaleidoscope $400 Round Matzah Cover $150 Click here to download a printable list of prices…
…came time for Rachel to start kindergarten, Joanne at the very last minute decided we should look at Ezra Academy. This was an act of great courage, because not only did it mean that friends and family would think we had turned into religious fanatics, it meant that her child would know more about Judaism than herself, before first grade — a humbling position to be in. At the same time, there is no greater source of nahus than being exceeded by on…
…erent. Everybody does something behind closed doors, whether it be write a cheap romance novel or go to some forbidden site on the Web. The thing I do behind closed doors is write poetry. Long and involved, they usually represent some flaw in humanity or in myself or just some tragic love poem. Words spurt out of my mouth and I have to write them down or else I lose them, the ideas slipping through my fingers like grains of sand in an hourglass. I…
…ften dropped when the phrase or verse ends in a open syllable. This is for phonetic reasons. Thus, the sheva (English: Shewa) represented by “e” in “lekha” becomes a long vowel, the qamatz represented by “a” in “lakh,” and the long vowel “a” at the end of “lekha” drops off altogether. “Lakh” and “otakh” are thus masculine singular forms, as we know from the rest of the sentence. Dear Rabbi, Is the prayer “ya`ale ve-yavo” added to Birkat HaMazo…
…e the space that is more welcoming to God. We all know from our efforts to decorate our homes, that our emotional state is affected by colors, fabrics, sculptures, paintings, singing, and light. These same factors in a sanctuary can affect our religious state of mind. There are design choices that we can make that will help us achieve a greater sense of peacefulness, awe, community, mystery, and religiosity. There are a number of factors that coul…
…th lists start with a broad thing to give up and then narrow it down: list number one — go from your land, your birthplace, your father’s house. List number two — take your son, your only son, the one you love, Isaac. This similarity led me to still others. One of the first, and most obvious, comparisons between the two instances of lekh lekha was that in both, God is sending Abraham on a journey. In the first lekh lekha, God is starting Abraham o…
…of all the people. Imagine if the parshah has told us, tribe by tribe, the number of people in each tribe, and separately, the number of males, 20 and up, who were fit for service. Would that kind of census send a different message to us, a message saying, “everyone counts”, including all the women? The second census, what I’ll call the redemption census, I find a strange one. It requires counting of all the male Levites who were at least a month…
…Horodezky, Sefer Shivhei HaBesht (Tel Aviv: Devir) 5707/1947, 5735/1975, p. 35. A table of tale numbers and the corresponding page numbers in other editions is given at the back of the book by Ben-Amos and Mintz. 2. Violence is neither advocated nor condoned in these tales to any significant extent, whereas many tales strongly advocate the efficacy and advantages of nonviolence. The main exception to this generalization are a few of the first fift…
…led up in succession? The result might violate even our minimal demands of decorum. If we were to limit joint aliya to two people per aliya, then on the one hand we would run into some family that will be just as disappointed with that limit as some families might be with the limit of one person per aliya. We put ourselves in the untenable position of setting a limit based on a committee’s sense of “decorum” while ignoring the halakha. That would…
