Nitzavim

By Rabbi Robert Freedman

Two phrases vie for the honor of being the most important in the Torah, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and “Humanity was made in the divine image.” Humbly I’d like to nominate another for one of the top ten. The verse is, “For the thing is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart to do it” (Deuteronomy 30:14). No other verse in Torah offers as strong reassuring certainty that we need not be confused or despairing about where to find life’s instruction manual.

At one time Moses protested that he was not a man of words, that for him speech was difficult and his lips were not fluent. But forty years later he preached the words of Deuteronomy. Throughout a full day he held forth, concluding by saying that the thing, the commandment, was not too far away or too difficult, “rather it is in your Read More >

Nitzavim-VaYelekh, our double portion for this week, includes the 7^th Haftarah in a series of Haftarot of Comfort and Consolation, read on the 7 Shabbatot following Tisha B Av. It is read on the Shabbat just preceding Rosh Hashanah as we are entering the period of intense personal introspection and accounting that is the essence of the Days of Awe.

The Haftarah comes from the Book of Isaiah, and is generally assumed to have been written by a prophet who lived in exile in Babylonia after the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem in 586 BCE.  As with many of the prophetic writings, he writes about national issues, specifically God s redemption of the Israelites and their promised triumphant return to Zion after generations of exile.

The prophet is comforting the exiles with the assurance that God has forgiven their sins (presented in earlier writings) and that they will be returning to Zion, to Jerusalem. Read More >

By Sanford Olshansky

When I was 22 years old, I had stopped practicing Judaism. My attendance at Shabbat services had dwindled to zero. Not so unusual – lots of Jews attend synagogue only on the High Holidays plus an occasional bar/bat mitzvah or wedding. But that year, I didn’t even attend High Holiday services – I worked – and it didn’t feel right.

Later that year I read The Source, by James Michener. As I became engrossed in it, I realized that it was speaking to me about a miracle – the miracle of Jewish survival. It reminded me that for over 3,000 years our continuous chain of tradition and belief has survived conquest, exile and dispersion, the rise and fall of empires and persecution which is unparalleled
in human history. It helped me to realize that I’m an heir to a unique spiritual heritage. If I hadn’t read Read More >

By Bruce Alpert

A number of years ago, I was part of a synagogue committee that evaluated the then new, gender-neutral edition of the Reform movement’s Gates of Prayer. The new siddur offered revised versions of several of the older book’s Kabbalat Shabbat services. One change ‘ having nothing to do with gender issues ‘ occured on the first page of the first service. Where the older version read ‘May God bless us with Shabbat joy, May God bless us with Shabbat holiness, May God bless us with Shabbat peace,’ the new version read ‘May we be blessed with Shabbat joy, May we be blessed with Shabbat peace, May we be blessed with Shabbat light.’

So focused was I on the siddur’s many other linguistic innovations that, at the time, I barely did more than note this change. Since then, however, I have come to think of this as Read More >