Earthquake Response
By Rabbi Nathan Kamesar What a devastating week it’s been around the world. The numbers of dead and missing coming out of Turkey and Syria as a result of the earthquakes there are overwhelming. At the time of this writing the death toll has surpassed 15,000, with many more injured, missing, stranded in the cold. […]
Refugee Shabbat • Song of the Sea
By Rabbi Nathan Kamesar I know I say this to all the B’nei Mitzvah students, Yul, but you really have a special parashah. So much so that your shabbat has a special name—Shabbat Shirah, the Shabbat of Song. Named, of course, after Shirat Hayam, the Song of the Sea—the most visibly noteworthy part of the […]
Shame as a vessel for transformation?
By Rabbi Nathan Kamesar At this past week’s Torah discussion, we discussed a heavy topic: shame. It came up in the context of the week’s parashah (Torah portion), Vayigash, meaning, “he approached.” The older brother Judah approached the younger brother Joseph, decades after Joseph’s older brother’s had sold him to a wandering caravan of traders descending […]
How Not To Measure Our Self-Worth | Investigating Our Own True Motivations
By Rabbi Nathan Kamesar Last week, we celebrated the Bat Mitzvah of Sarah Tobacman. Sarah’s parashah (Torah portion) was Vayetze a phrase which literally translates to “he left,” as in Jacob, our ancestor, left his hometown of Be’er Sheva—fled it, is more accurate—after purloining the patriarchal blessing of his father Isaac, a blessing which had been intended for Jacob’s […]
Understanding Lonlieness Through The Prayers of Kabbalat Shabbat
By Rabbi Nathan Kamesar I was honored to be invited to offer a teaching for My Jewish Learning, the web’s leading pluralistic, nondenominational Jewish educational resource, and I did so on Divine Loneliness and Kabbalat Shabbat, a reflection on the idea that God, too, might be lonely, yearning for connection, and how Kabbalat […]