Episodes
Wednesday May 26, 2021
Reopening the Synagogue When People Are Coming up the Down Staircase
Wednesday May 26, 2021
Wednesday May 26, 2021
How do we reopen the synagogue after over a year of being virtual? For some it's procedural: distance appropriately, follow guidelines, limit numbers, maybe wait on the food. But the Temple is not a gathering of bodies, it's a gathering of souls. How do we reopen appropriately to be a holy community, one that recognizes each other as souls? One of my favorite mishnayot speaks to this, and I was happy to be scooped by Professor Naomi Kalish in applying it to us today: https://www.jtsa.edu/struggling-to-celebrate There are four categories of people who went up the downstaircase at the Temple, and down the up staircase: the one in mourning, the one caring for a relative, the one who has been isolated, and the one who has lost a precious object. In this Dvar Torah on Emor, I apply these to our norms for a holy reopening.
Helpful picture: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Huldah_Gates3344.JPG
Sunday May 09, 2021
God the Mother
Sunday May 09, 2021
Sunday May 09, 2021
Leviticus ends with a long list of horrifying predictions (or curses) of the vicious suffering of the Israelites when they eventually enter the Land and break the covenant. Western Civilization has been shaped by European Christian intellectuals who created the unchallenged image (and therefore a Western bias) that the God of the Old Testament is a God who is disposed toward anger and punishment, who seems to enjoy punisment and retribution (and thus God had to be made flesh in the Son to introduce Love). In this podcast, I ask us to hear these verses as the words of the Mother, who, as in Wendell Berry's poem (which I read at the end) sees the Mother foreseeing one's sins, suffering in that foreknowledge with you, before you, with love and forgiveness already there symbolized by the made bed, the "you can always come home" that transcends the future into the past. Is the angry God we project, really the No-God of Jeremiah, the idol of our own making, which externalizes our own anger at climate change, social and racial inequality, rather than God the Mother who suffers along with us within the thorn bush of the Burning Bush but is not consumed?
Friday Apr 30, 2021
Ross Douthat, Biblical Impurity, and Antipathy toward the Temple
Friday Apr 30, 2021
Friday Apr 30, 2021
Is Leviticus's insistence that those with skin afflictions (as well as having buried the dead) not go to Temple an exclusionary punishment for being sick? Or is that our modern reading which presumes that religion is exclusionary and judgmental? In this presentation, I use Ross Douthat's essay "Can the Meritocracy Find God?
The secularization of America probably won’t reverse unless the intelligentsia gets religion" as a way to talk about America's prejudices against religion, and my particular concern that even Jewish leaders like me are too silent in the face of the current hype that all the cool innovation (and funding) is happening outside of our legacy institutions [which actually is an unchallenged claim mainly by people who don't go to synagogue] and that our success as communities should be judged as to how easy we make it for unaffiliated Jews to get their needs met without having to attend the Temple as it exists in our day. Is that respectful of the Temple?