Thinking Torah Blog

This week marks the end of the Book of Numbers and a significant shift in the Torah narrative. The Israelites have arrived at the doorstep of the Promised Land and Moses spends the beginning of this week’s Torah portion, Masei, mentioning all the places the Israelites have encamped over the last 40 years. He is in a reflective mood, as he knows that his time with the people is also coming to end. When I was getting my MA in Jewish...Read more...

I write to you from Jerusalem, where I am in the midst of 10 days of learning at the Shalom Hartman Institute. The Hartman Institute is an incredible center of learning, deeply dedicated to pluralism, Zionism, and Jewish peoplehood. Every year, Hartman welcomes rabbis from across the spectrum of Judaism to learn together and grapple with some of the most challenging questions of Jewish peoplehood today. This year's theme is "Why Israel?," a...Read more...

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about how we perceive time and divide time in our lives. What are the touchstones that help us define periods in our life? How do we relate to critical moments that have happened or are going to happen and imagine how they cause us to change? In what ways does shared time establish connection and identity between groups of people?

For our ancestors in the desert, there are several guideposts of...Read more...

When we heard about the leaked draft decision from SCOTUS that will likely regress our country 50 years, we were all angered but not surprised. A few of us decided to head to Washington D.C. to share our outrage. The words below were written by Sagen Fuller, our Religious & Hebrew School Coordinator and member of our congregation:

On Tuesday, Rabbi Whinston, Rabbi Alter, Cantor Hayut, and over ten other representatives of TBE...Read more...

Today is Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day for the Jewish community. In our congregation, we are blessed to have Generations After, a group of children of survivors who write about their parent’s experience in the Shoah and their own coping with survivor parents. As has been the case for many years, last night, Generations After led an extraordinary Yom Hashoah service. As I was sitting in the sanctuary, looking around at those in...Read more...

When I was in my high school youth group, the songleaders with their acoustic guitars were often the center of energy around which others orbited. Those songleaders usually had bumper stickers plastered across their guitar cases. One sticker I remember distinctly read, "Straight But Not Narrow." Coming of age in the 90s, thank God, the world was beginning to change concerning the LGBTQ community, and in NFTY (the Reform Movement's youth...Read more...

With this week’s Torah portion, Tazria, we transition from the ordination of the priests and the bulk of the sacrificial system to skin diseases. In Hebrew, the skin disease in question, called tzara’at, is often translated as leprosy, but it was probably some type of psoriasis. It seems odd that the Torah would spend chapters discussing a skin infection that was not deadly and did not cause much harm to the infected person. For this...Read more...

I’ve been thinking about the word “feeling” lately. I love that we use feeling or feel for both internal emotions and physical sensations. So often, we separate our inner state from the externality of our worlds, but the truth is worlds always play off each other. Things that we physically feel can impact us emotionally and vice versa. Maybe feelings are the only things that get us moving in this life. Over and over again, in this...Read more...