Looking Back on the Journey A D’var Torah for Parshiyot Mattot-Masei By Cantor Sandy Horowitz   Parashat Masei, the final reading in the book of Numbers, begins with these words: אֵלֶּה מַסְעֵי בְנֵי־יִשְׂרָאֵל אֲשֶׁר יָצְאוּ מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרַיִם... “These are the journeys of the people of Israel who set out from the land of Egypt… (Numbers 33:1) The text then goes on to name each of the forty-two places where the Israelites stopped during their forty-year journey, up until they arrived at the river Jordan across from Jericho.  There is a pattern in the way the journey is described: each stopping place has its own verse, and each journey from one place to the next is described using the same verbs, vayis’u (“and they set out Read More >

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