Breaking Up Time Is A Sacred Act
By Rabbi Nathan Kamesar Happy Thanksgiving! Don’t worry (if you were): I’m not writing this email on Thanksgiving; I’m spending time with my family. That’s the beauty of the “schedule send” function that is now so common in email services. But this topic of creating space away from work relates to the remarks I delivered […]
What Got You Here Won’t Aid You There?
By Rabbi Nathan Kamesar This past Shabbat we studied Parashat Vayetzei, the Torah portion known as Vayetzei, in the middle of the Book of Bereshit (Genesis), chronicling the formative episodes of our ancestors as they develop from a family into a nation. The Torah portion picks up with our ancestor Jacob leaving (Vayetzei comes from the root meaning to leave […]
A Bar Mitzvah’s Reflections on Abundance and Scarcity
By Rabbi Nathan Kamesar This past Shabbat, we celebrated the Bar Mitzvah of Aldo. Aldo’s parashah (Torah portion) was Toldot. Toldot literally means something like “lineage;” it is related to the common Hebrew words yeled and yaldah, which mean boy and girl, respectively, and which come from the root י-ל-ד, which means to give birth. In the context of Aldo’s parashah, whose first […]
We Have… Two Souls, Sometimes?
By Rabbi Nathan Kamesar I wanted to share a version the remarks I shared this past Shabbat, at our first TGIShabbat in over twenty months. That evening, as on all Friday evenings, we sang the words v’shamru v’nei yisrael et hashabat “The Israelite people shall keep Shabbat… For in six days Adonai made heaven and earth,” u’vayom ha’shevi’t […]