Numbers
Imagine that you are given a chest full of gold coins. You thank your benefactor and take it home. As soon as the door is securely bolted, what's the first thing you do? Count them, of course.
| FROM THE CHASSIDIC MASTERS |
Sefirah: Revelation and Struggle
The story of our daily lives, say the Chassidic masters, is one of constant struggle, of the exhausting climb up the ladder of perfection, developing the raw material of our being, approaching, yet never quite achieving wholeness. It is a ladder whose base is fixed in the dark valley of a world where G-d hides His face, and whose uppermost rung stretches to the wellspring of light.
The prototype of this journey is Sefirat HaOmer, the forty-nine day counting of the days from Passover to Shavuot.
"This is Education"
On Rosh Hashanah of 1888, when I was a child of seven and several months, I visited my grandmother and she treated me to a melon. I went out to the yard and sat with my friends on a bench directly opposite my father's window and shared the melon with my friends.
My father called me in and said to me: "I noticed that while you shared the melon with your friends, but you did not do so with a whole heart."
A Blessed Curse
The exams began. That was in the summer of 1948; Stalin had already delivered his famous toast to the "great Russian people." Mikhoels had been murdered already. The epoch of Jewish newspapers, theaters, and publishing houses was reaching its last days. The era of the Stalin-Zhdanov ideological decrees against "cosmopolitanism" was beginning. Rumors spread that institutions of higher learning were going to be restrictive about accepting Jews, particularly in schools of nuclear physics.
Is G-d a He?
Over the past few decades, a new and distinctive movement has emerged among Jews who are attempting to reclaim some kind of spiritual meaning for their lives. The question has been: If we are recovering our connection to the Divine, can we find that connection in traditional Judaism?
The question has been particularly difficult for many Jewish women because of the picture of G-d we inherited. The G-d we learned about as youngsters-that distant, kingly figure who watched over us-seemed, for women discovering their feminine consciousness, too blatantly male. In popular feminism, the G-d of the Hebrew Bible, of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim tradition, has gotten a bad reputation as "the patriarchal G-d of Western culture."
Chapter Three
Rabbi Chanina, deputy to the kohanim, would say: Pray for the integrity of the government; for were it not for the fear of its authority, a man would swallow his neighbor alive.
Rabbi Elazar of Bartosa would say: Give Him what is His, for you, and whatever is yours, are His. As David says: "For everything comes from You, and from Your own hand we give to You."
As word of the festive gathering swiftly spread along Kenya's Jewish grapevine, the anticipated number of guests phoning in their RSVPs from across Eastern Africa began to balloon. For the first night of Passover, more than seventy five participants: permanent residents, Israeli businessmen and American tourists, emerged from the far reaches of the jungle to gather around the traditional seder table.
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Emor
Leviticus 21:1-24:23
Week of May 7 - May 13, 2000
The
Parshah In A Nutshell
Full
Parshah Summary With Commentary
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