- 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
…y of Shabbat and weekday programs for children and youth expanded, and the number of minors grew from under 70 in 1994 to over 225 a decade later. A typical Shabbat morning includes simultaneous programs or services for children and youth, as well as youth participating in the main service and Shabbat Shalom Torah Study. In 2003, the congregation began a process of building renovations, aimed at improving accessibility, enhancing energy efficiency…
…d by the Good Book: “While the flesh was still between their teeth,” etc. (Numbers 11:33). Partly for that reason we are enjoined to wait a period of time after eating meat before eating dairy. But after some time, the “food” in your mouth (and stuck on or between your teeth) ceases to be “food.” Who would eat it? If your toothbrush is used at that point, it is not really in contact with “meat” or “dairy” and thus, strictly speaking, you would not…
…sen under the banner of Jubilee 2000 to cancel the debt of the poorest countries by the end of the year. As reported in the 24 April 24 2000 edition of The Nation by Rev. Robert Edgar, general secretary of the National Council of Churches, Grounded in biblical mandates of jubilee calling for the forgiveness of debt, the freeing of slaves and the return of lands so as not to perpetuate generations of impoverishment, this movement seeks to promote m…
…othing, perhaps – unconnected, just a coincidence; but what if all three patriarchs and all three Divine attributes were somehow to correspond? Would that not strengthen the hint we have of connection? In search of correspondence, I looked around a bit and found an illustration in my edition of the medieval mystical text of the Zohar. The illustration is of the Ten Sefirot – mystical attributes of the one God. The uppermost level, from which all e…
…permission for the Jews to defend themselves. They decimate Haman and his tribe, with a truly frightful body count. Haman, Hitler, and most alarmingly even the Palestinians are lumped together as descendants of Amaleq. For those Jews who want to read the text in this way, sparing Amaleq at the expense of Israel defies the will of God. It may even be seen as a positive commandment to commit genocide. “Remember Amaleq” starts to sound like “Remembe…
…think, “We can do it.” Our attitude is, “Just say yes.” Last June we had a tribute dinner, honoring the rabbi and Miriam and raising a lot of money for the shul. A zillion people worked to make that happen. 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…
…oint. Today, the power grid in America is, shall we say, a very complex distribution network. The way it operates is by a certain number of power plants producing energy, usually by burning fossil fuels, and then feeding it into the massive grid of electrical power lines. I think this is quite similar to the societal structure of the monkeys and the medieval Jewish court system, in that the majority of interactions, or in this case, power transmis…
…speaks for itself. You’ll note also that today’s parasha resounds with the number seven – the seventh year is the sabbatical year- the seven days of Passover, the seven weeks until the Feast of weeks, etc. At some point during this last year I looked around the table and realized- “We are seven women — one teacher and six students.” Coincidence? Book of Ruth Let me move on to The Book of Ruth. I’d like to make some remarks about the story that res…
…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…
…hitting as a punitive measure would be disallowed under the ‘do not add’ stricture. It is questionable in any case whether striking one’s wife in anything less than a life-and-death situation could actually be a constructive act. Just as “a mitzvah draws forth another mitzvah, and a transgression draws forth another transgression,”38 so too does one violent act draw forth another violent act. It would be instructive to know what actually happened…
