- 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
…o sense in beating around the bush – definitive proof that the plot for the 1995 movie, Toy Story, is the Joseph story spliced together with the Exodus story! Other movies covered in the course were Prince of Egypt, in which the brilliant Moses dream sequence illustrates the concept of “hierophany” – revelation of the sacred; Groundhog Day, in which weatherman Phil Connor’s struggle for release from circular time hinges on doing teshuvah; and the…
…to denial, anger, fear, or guilt. This does not mean that I went through it 100% anxiety-free. I felt my will assert itself, however, from a level deeper than any anxiety. When my best medical alternative quickly became clear, my deeper energies turned foremost to communicating with those around me. In service of this powerful need, I found within me an unusual calm and lucidity. These helped me to reach out to those close to me in special ways bo…
…asha [Torah reading for Shavuot Second Day in Diaspora: Deuteronomy 14:22 – 16:17 & Numbers 28:26-31]. It begins with the commandment to tithe on a yearly basis, so as to provide for the needy among us, to take care of the Levites, to understand that our year’s bounty is not just a result of our great skill but also of God’s goodness, and to realize that our possessions are merely possessions- whose enjoyment comes from sharing them with others. T…
…essage. Over the course of the school year, the kids would memorize a fair number of these. The sayings she chose reflected her particular take on Judaism, which tended to the ethical rather than the spiritual. In cleaning out her apartment last year, my sister Naomi and I came across some of these sayings, which I’ve brought with me to show you. Some of the pitgamim were easy to memorize and therefore were very popular with the kids: “Tov shem m’…
…ky (“A Natural History of Peace,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2006 p. 104), they live as a collection of small groups, each one an individual node. In this networked society, most of the interactions between individual nodes are local ones. The further away any two given groups are. the less frequently they interact, but they do retain the ability to communicate. This network, when properly balanced, produces highly cooperative clusters of i…
…Prior to that, the last tribute dinner anyone could recall took place about 15 years ago, honoring Mr. Friedman, alav hashalom. Well, once every 15 years isn’t often enough. This coming November, we will hold another tribute dinner. I am honor bound not to say too much tonight. The Board and the honorees know why. This year’s first-ever auction, chaired by Donna Levine, was a brilliant success and a lot of fun. We are already planning the next one…
…lieve that the book of Isaiah was written during the Babylonian exile by a number of people in addition to Isaiah. Isaiah himself was a prophet of the nation of Judah and was one of the first to leave a written record of his prophecies, or proclamations. The book of Isaiah is one of the longest in the Bible, containing sixty chapters. The sayings of Isaiah are contained in the first 39 chapters. Most of the rest, written around 550 BCE, were poems…
…inyamin Zev, pp. 247 and 248. 10. Saul Lieberman, Tosefta, Baba Qama ch. 9, 1975. 11. Sefer Niziqin, hilkhot hovel umeziq, 4:16. 12. See for example SMa”G, mitzvot ase, 147:3, citing the Geonim, and Rabbenu Yeroham ben Meshulam (14th century, Provence) in his Sefer Meisharim, 40 13-5 58:2. 13. SMa”G, 147:2-3. 14. Even HaEzer, hilkhot ketubot 83. The citation given in Kesef Mishne in Frankel’s edition is 85 but 83 seems more to the point. 15. Even…
…irds) of these displaced persons simply resettled elsewhere in Palestine by 1950. Israel had offered to settle an additional 100,000 Arab refugees at that time in the portion of Mandatory Palestine under its control, but the offer was declined by the Arab states. The majority of these displaced persons were tenants who suffered the tremendous trauma of dislocation, regardless of how the blame is apportioned. After Yasir Arafat and his associated o…
…inable thing, they will both surely die and their blood is upon them. (Lev. 18:20, 20:13) As we know, these texts have been used are being used, to exclude, oppress, and even kill gay men – and lesbians as well, although the text makes no mention of them. Hertz (or as we call it here at BEKI, the blue Hertz humash) comments that “with a man” indicates that the text “Disclosed the abyss of depravity from which the Torah saved the Israelite. This un…
