Pinhas in Process A D’var Torah for Parashat Pinhas By Rabba Kaya Stern-Kaufman (2011) This week we are reading a section of Torah named for Pinhas, the grandson of Aaron, who was a zealot for God. His story begins in the previous week’s Torah portion when many of the Israelite men become caught up in sexual relationships with the local Moabite women who enjoined them to worship Baal Peor, a local deity. In response, God sends a plague and thousands of Israelites die. Once again, things are not going well for either God or the Israelites. The Israelites' fidelity to God is consistently weak and wavering and God responds with consistent wrath and destruction. In the midst of this chaos, an Israelite man and a Read More >

A D’var Torah for Parshiyot Hukkat-Balak By Rabbi Wendy Love Anderson (2023) The Strangest Mitzvah What do you think is the strangest commandment in the entire Torah? There’s some pretty stiff competition. Is it the prohibition on combining wool and linen? The insistence that it’s fine to eat cows and goats but not pigs? The sandal and spitting ritual that accompanies a brother’s refusal to marry his widowed sister-in-law? The prohibition against rounding the corners of one’s beard? While some commandments are morally challenging, others are intellectually puzzling, making them difficult to explain, much less defend against criticism. Parashat Hukkat opens with a novel Israelite ritual: in order to prepare a special liquid that will be used to ritually purify individuals contaminated by contact with a human corpse, an unblemished red Read More >

In this week’s D’var Torah, Rabbi Wendy Love Anderson offers a rationale, not for the puzzling ritual of the red heifer, but for why we should keep asking about it

A D’var Torah for Parashat Korah By Rabbi Dorit Edut (AJR 2006) “Jewish tradition cherishes free speech. ‘When a person refrains from speech, the ideas die, the soul stops, and the senses deteriorate,’ said Moses ibn Ezra, insisting on respect for honest differences of opinion. (Shirat Yisrael, 12c). If one reads the classic texts of the rabbinic era, the Mishnah and the Gemara, every page brims with the arguments both of the majority and of those who dissented from them, recognizing that each reflected aspects of God’s truth. ‘These and these are the words of God,’ the Talmud observes about these disputes (Eruvin 13b).”[1] Yet while Jewish law encourages robust debate and respectful dialogue, it strictly prohibits malicious speech, such as gossip, public shaming, and Read More >