Dealing with Uncertainty
By Rabbi Nathan Kamesar This past Shabbat we read that perhaps most famous of all parshiyot (Torah portions): vayera. Vayera means “and he appeared,” referring to the divine presence appearing before our foremost ancestor Abraham, communicating to him and his wife Sarah that they would indeed have a son, their old age notwithstanding. The parsha’s notoriety comes not from this moment alone […]
Our Democracy
By Rabbi Nathan Kamesar I have always loved Election Day. The ideal of having an engaged citizenry collectively come together—millions of us, across the states—recognizing that our well-being is wrapped up in one another’s; that our lives are, for better or for worse, in one another’s hands (as made all the more clear by this […]
Joy and Sorrow in Our Communities
By Rabbi Nathan Kamesar This past week we celebrated our first Bat Mitzvah since the start of the pandemic with a beautiful service led by our Bat Mitzvah, Emma Salzman. Her Torah portion was Noah, perhaps one of the most well-known narratives in the history of storytelling. I sometimes find these to be the most […]
The Strangest Book in the Bible
By Rabbi Nathan Kamesar This past week at our weekly Torah study together in the midst of our Shabbat services, we studied the book of Ecclesiastes. (Yes, Ecclesiastes, or, Kohelet, its Hebrew name, is indeed in the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible. It is located in the third of three sections of the Tanakh, following (1) the Torah, i.e., […]
Sukkot: A Reflection on Our Transience and Impermanence
By Rabbi Nathan Kamesar With the High Holidays behind us, we are going to return to our minhag (custom) of sending out weekly summaries of our Shabbat morning Torah conversations. As a reminder, each week during our Shabbat morning service, we engage with a text from our weekly Torah portion and ask, how does this text apply […]