- 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
…(as in, “You shall have no other gods before me”). Some people wish to transfer that sanctity to the common English word “God” (hence, “G-d”). Although there is no basis for this in law, who am I to stand in the way of popular or personal piety. If you have such coins, especially if the chocolate is still there, and especially if it is milk chocolate, please bring them to my office and I will dispose of them properly. If the chocolate is already g…
…hat space is sacred, and that in that space, we are called upon to build a Sanctuary. If God is within us, then we each must build a Sanctuary within. If God is between us, then together we must build a Sanctuary in our midst. My third teaching commitment has been with my son, Jonathan. We have been studying Parashat Bereshit and Rashi’s commentary on it weekly in preparation for Jonathan’s Bar Mitzva next fall. Here I learned that the first day o…
…ou all. Please help us again, this time by passing along our thanks to the number of congregants who are away this weekend of Thanksgiving, giving thanks of their own elsewhere. The morning of the surgery I prayed and learned another prayerbook lesson, this time explicit. At my request, Marsha had brought me a copy of our Siddur, Sim Shalom. Uncharacteristically, I admit, I started from the beginning of the Shaharit, or morning, service. There I d…
…en were embracing and handing a child to each other. While we did this, we sang a verse from the siddur: “ve-kulam miqablim aleihem `ol malkhut shamayim, ze me ze: they all took upon themselves the yoke of the heavenly kingdom, accepting it from one another.” The words and the actions dramatized vividly that we were not only choosing to take on our traditions, but also enabling one another to do so. When I moved to Connecticut and went shul shoppi…
…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’…
…ll of Israel and put them as chieftains over the people: officials for thousands, officials for hundreds, officials for fifties, and officials for tens.” A few verses back, Yitro, Moshe’s father-in-law, had suggested this judicial plan as a solution to Moshe’s volume problem. Moshe was supposed to judge every case among the Israelites, civil or criminal, by himself, from dawn to dusk. Yitro knew that Moshe wouldn’t last for long that way, and came…
…to release any slaves we are holding. During this time, if one was unsuccessful on their own plot of land or met misfortune — they could bond themselves to another- and work as their slave, so to speak. However, at the end of the seventh year, the creditor is told here that not only must the debt be released — but we are also to give him the provisions needed to be successful independently — “thou shall furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and…
…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…
…ion of a new category of separation without divorce, forced divorce, court-sanctioned torture, use of non-Jews as agents of the court, and women owning real estate completely independent of their husbands’ control, among other phenomena. All of the major codes of halakha deal with legal principles that jurists apply to this specific type of crime. Among the major sources on this issue are a series of responsa by Rabbi Shlomo ben Avraham Adret (Ras…
…time, right-wing voices are reported to talk about the desirability of transferring Arab populations out of Israel or Israeli-controlled territory. Rehavam Ze’evi (assassinated in 2001 by the PFLP) and his Moledet party advocated transfer the Arab population from the West Bank and Gaza “by agreement” or during war to neighboring countries. The fact that a major highway (No. 90) through the Jordan Valley is named “Gandhi’s Road” in his honor is tak…
