Guns, Continued.
By Rabbi Nathan Kamesar Dear Friends, I can’t believe—or, perhaps by now I can—that I’m writing about gun violence for my weekly D’var Torah for the third time in four weeks, this time for a mass shooting that took place in, essentially, the synagogue’s literal own backyard, and thus, effectively, many of your own backyards, at approximately 3rd and South […]
The Back and Forth of Torah and Our Lives
By Rabbi Nathan Kamesar Some weeks, in our exploration of the weekly Torah portion, we react to the events of the world immediately around us. Other weeks the Torah portion raises themes that apply to our lives or our Judaism on a more subtle, ongoing basis. This past Shabbat we read the final parashah (portion) from the […]
Guns.
By Rabbi Nathan Kamesar This week, for my weekly email to the congregation, I was planning to share the remarks I delivered this past Friday evening at TGIShabbat, when I spoke about the racist massacre in a Buffalo, New York grocery store on the basis of, according to some iterations, an antisemitic conspiracy theory. The […]
Creating a Palace in Time Amidst the Whirlwind of the World
By Rabbi Nathan Kamesar A couple of months ago I underscored the idea, using Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s famous turn of phrase, that Shabbat is meant to be a palace in time: immune to the whims and vagaries of the weekday rhythms, the trials and tribulations we encounter on a daily basis, the ups and […]
Reflecting on the Meaning to be Found in Counting
By Rabbi Nathan Kamesar In our Saturday morning Torah discussion last week, held weekly from approximately 10:30-11 am as part of our Shabbat service, having recently been enriched by the additional, weekly participation of our Hebrew School students, we discussed Parashat Emor, the Torah portion known as “Emor,” Hebrew for “Speak!” with Adonai telling Moses to […]