D'var from Saturday, April 7, 2018 - Rabbi David Kosak. K'heref Ayin In a Blink of an Eye - How Our Stories Make or Break Yizkor. Recorded and edited by Ed Kraus.
It was after Cantor Bitton’s Jewish TV theme song program. I turned around and asked my 12th graders, “why do you think there were/are so many Jews in Hollywood?” They didn’t accept the implicit premise of my question--that either there was a much higher percentage of Jews in Hollywood than in the general population--or explained that Jewish presence was just about contacts and who you know. It was as though my question struck their ears as racist.
D'var from Saturday, March 24, 2018 - Gail Sherman. Recorded and edited by Ed Kraus.
Passover has long been called the Jewish Master Story. Other names for this type of story are a master narrative or a meta-narrative. In short, when a single story can robustly define and explain a people’s history, hopes, dreams and defeats, we can think of it as a master story. Master stories resonate with every member of a society or an audience precisely because they give expression to that person’s deeply held values.
I love words. You can’t be a storyteller or a poet if you don’t. Thankfully, I am hardly alone. Of perhaps all religious traditions, Judaism is arguably the most word-driven. The Torah, of course is “the word of God.” Then there’s the Talmud, all 2,711 pages of it, and millions of pages of commentary. We utter brakhot, blessings, before eating or lighting candles or smelling a rose, all to sanctify our ordinary actions.
Jewish time. I’m not talking the tired joke about how all our events start late. Rather, you’ve previously heard me discuss how historically, every culture of substance has maintained its own calendar and its own clock. Time, after all, is the medium by which we measure the space between events. Each culture chooses which events it wishes to remember, celebrate or mark. That’s historical time—the way we carry the past into the present.
The Kosak family is still recovering from all of our recent festivities. I am catching up on work, so my remarks this week are coming out later than normal. What a wonderful weekend it was last Shabbat. I want to thank everyone who helped celebrate with us as Shayah stepped up to the Torah as a bar mitzvah.
