Judaism
Weekly Torah Commentary: Perashat Shemot- The Midwives and Bio-politics
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…The refusal of the midwives to allow death to proceed made them the vehicle for the archetype of social change, the Exodus…
Judaism
Weekly Torah Commentary: Perashat Vayehi- The Silence Is the Message
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…believe that the silence will be revealed as illusion…this darkness can be surmounted if one learns to see beyond the immediate reality. “Live” even when that is not compatible with the surrounding situation, and thus, become the agent of change that brings about the alternative situation!…
Judaism
Weekly Torah Commentary Perashat Vayigash: Personal Narrative and the Needs of Others
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…it often takes an attentive recollection, review and retelling of one’s own story, an honest construction of one’s personal narrative, in order for any person to become aware of this kind of presence in their own life and to give it meaning…
Judaism
Weekly Torah Commentary Perashat Miketz: Overcoming Fragmentation- Dreams, Silence, and the Chora
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…The brothers are put through an episode that to the brothers must have appeared as a moment of paranoid psychosis on the part of the Egyptians, the whole family suddenly arrested and charged without any idea of what they have done. Is this not the experience of Joseph K, in Kafka’s The Trial? Is that not the unfortunate reality for oppressed minorities? Here, as a result of this dress rehearsal for the Kafkaesque reality of societal anomie, the brothers are now ready to face the real reality of a hostile society, by being used to working “beneath” the surface, in silence, going underground…
General News
Chanukka: On Jews, Greeks and Germans
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…the cultural choices one must choose between can be evaluated by criteria: by their effect upon the spirit.There are cultural and existential choices that bring hearts together, and there are those that lead to arrogance and aggression. The same great modes of thinking that bring about the greatest steps forward in human development can sometimes be accompanied by ideas that lead to the greatest suffering. Chanukka is meant to be about choosing the former, and rejecting the latter…
Judaism
Torah Commentary Perashat Vayeshev: Judah vs Joseph Consciousness
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…rather than an ‘either:or’ presentation of the paradigms of Judah and Joseph, the text recognizes the situational need and contribution of both forms of leadership and development, perhaps to be human represents this continuous give and take between ‘certainty’ and the ‘search’…
Gender and Sexuality
Weekly Torah Commentary: Vayishlach- On Not Blaming the Victim
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…one who is sensitive to these matters cannot help feeling that simply ignoring the most prominently accepted commentator does not heal the added injustice done to Dinah and Leah (injustice one: the actual crime, injustice two: a tradition blaming the victims for the crime). The tradition of using these texts as a proof for the value of modesty is a long one, and it becomes to some degree a third trauma, to all the women who read this, who thus internalize a subtext of personal responsibility for crimes of this sort…
Judaism
Weeky Torah Commentary on Perashat Vayetze: Stumbling Forward into the Night
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…The dream will be revealed to be the reality we frequently were able to sense, to be tugging at us from just beneath the everyday, a sense of meaning beneath the cruel and unjust “realities” of contemporary existence….
Torah_Commentary
Weekly Torah Commentary: Blessings and Textual Operations
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I will have to confront a bias right at the start. In any reading, this portion of the Torah raises several issues which are difficult for us to confront. “Confront”, as in “confrontation”, for there is not an element in this narrative that is not problematic at a very visceral level.
Torah_Commentary
Incision and Gender
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One fortunate result of the San Francisco bill attempting to ban circumcision is the resurgence of dialogue about this tradition and its meaning in contemporary society….can we view circumcision in fact, as an act of protest against Western gender roles and preconceptions?