You can trawl the internet for treasures, and you will find them. A perfect picture of Mt. Hood on a cloudless day when the snow sparkles from miles away, or that sweater on Instagram you’ve been searching for. Maybe a meme that makes you laugh out loud on a humorless day. You can trawl the internet for treasures, and many do, but it’s the serendipity of the found object that really thrills me.
When we look forward to something, when we’re fully present, time has a way of both standing still and moving faster than we realize. Parshat Vayetzei reminds us that those moments allow us to see clearly all that has passed and perhaps the immediacy of the future.
Peshita. Peshita is this fabulous Talmudic shorthand that instructs us to look past the obvious. Literally, it means “simple,” and its implications are that a given explanation is so obvious and clear that it would be unnecessary to even mention it. Instead, when the Talmud says peshita about some concept, it is actually asking us to seek the novel insight that isn’t obvious. What can we learn by looking past our first assumptions?
This week's Torah portion hints that God guides Rebekah not to the son who is “older and wiser,” but to the one who is “more apt” to lead a nation. In this moment that breaks the norms we’ve come to know, the Torah suggests that in some cases character might be more important than experience.
George was sick the day I took over for him at Kibbutz Ramat HaShofet, which is also the day I came to a new understanding of our ancestors Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses. But I am getting ahead of myself.
Reality TV plays into the romantic notion that falling in love is part magic and part serendipity. Actual reality, though, is much more complicated, but in a way, makes a lot more sense.
Who are the Jews? This is the sort of question that has generated countless answers. There is the historical approach, which will track our origins at least to an ancient Egyptian stele, or stone column, with an inscription that mentions how they “laid waste” to the Kingdom of Israel, thousands of years ago. There is a biological answer as there are definite genetic markers that the priestly class of kohenim carry. There of course is a religious answer, in which the Jews offer to the world the purest, earliest form of monotheism.
