T’shuvah and the Margin for Error
by Rabbi Nathan Kamesar I’d like to share with you the D’var Torah I shared Friday night in advance of Abigail Hamilton’s beautiful Bat Mitzvah celebration this past Shabbat: There’s a phrase that’s been floating around in the public consciousness lately that has been resonating with me on a number of levels in […]
One Thing I Ask
by Rabbi Nathan Kamesar This past week, as part of our celebrating our first Bat Mitzvah of the year (Mazal Tov, Madeleine Wilson!), I shared the following D’var Torah: In a few moments, we’re going to sing a verse of a psalm that anchors us in the season in which we find ourselves, […]
Building New Worlds with our Torah
by Rabbi Nathan Kamesar One of the core features of the Bar Mitzvah is when a student offers his own teaching, his own D’var Torah—words of Torah reflecting his interpretation of his Torah portion after a period of wrestling with it. As Rabbis Arthur Waskow and Phyllis Berman put it, “This is the core of […]
A Bar Mitzvah Student Grapples with the Scapegoat • (Im)purity: Alienation vs Integration
By Rabbi Nathan Kamesar Dear Friends, This Shabbat, we celebrated the Bar Mitzvah for Elias Zaring. Elias’s parashah, as will be discussed below, was the double portion of achareit-mot/kedoshim, two portions in the midst of the book of Leviticus that include the portion that is read each year on Yom Kippur, involving the ritual of “the […]
What Covenant Can Mean To Us • Boundaries, People!
By Rabbi Nathan Kamesar I want to share the D’var Torah I delivered this past Friday night on the week’s parashah, on the eve of our student Alex Howe’s Bar mitzvah: I was drawn to a very specific part of this week’s parashah, this week’s Torah portion. Perhaps you’ll be able to sense why. First […]