Ann Arbor Reconstructionist Congregation

Divrei Torah

Cedar’s D’var Torah

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Words by Cedar Adams

Shabbat shalom and good morning everyone, thanks for coming to my Bar Mitzvah. 

My Torah portion is called Ki Teitzei and is from the Book of Deuteronomy. Ki Teitzei is about laws, containing 74 of the 613 mitzvot. The words ki teitzei mean “when you go out,”  in reference to going out to war and how you should behave if you take captives. The laws in my portion are generally about how to act properly with respect to familial relationships, ethics, sexuality, and forbidden mixtures.

One of the mitzvot with a positive message is that fathers cannot be killed because of their son’s actions, and vice versa. This is a helpful mitzvah because it stops people from being unfairly punished. Another example of a helpful mitzvah is that if you find something lost by someone else in your community then you should bring it back to them, or (if you do not know the owner) keep it at your house until they claim the lost object. The Torah says: 

“If your fellow Israelite does not live near you or you do not know who [the owner] is, you shall bring it home and it shall remain with you until your peer claims it; then you shall give it back.”   (Deuteronomy 22:2)

While many of these mitzvot are helpful, with some it is worth questioning if they are in fact good deeds. 

My aliyah ends with a mitzvah that I struggle with.  Here the Torah tells us that if your son is disobedient, rude, and refuses to change his ways despite parental intervention, take him out to the village elders where you will publicly declare that he is disobedient and ungrateful. Afterwards, all the men in the town will stone him to death. The Torah states: 

“If a householder has a wayward and defiant son, who does not heed his father or mother and does not obey them even after they discipline him, his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his town at the public place of his community. They shall say to the elders of his town … Thereupon his town’s council shall stone him to death. Thus you will sweep out evil from your midst: all Israel will hear and be afraid.”    (Deuteronomy 21:18-21)

This is wrong because nobody deserves to die just for being disobedient. The Torah describes the disobedient son as “wayward and rebellious,” but I would like to question exactly what that means. There are many different reasons for a son to be considered disobedient, and different parents would have different explanations. “Wayward and rebellious” could mean many things, depending on who you ask. For example, a parent might think their child is “wayward and rebellious” for dressing as the opposite gender would, even though today that is normalized. I think a more reasonable solution would be to have someone try helping the son, or having someone help the son and the parents resolve the conflict.

The second mitzvah that I’d like to discuss concerns “The child of the unloved wife.”  The Torah portion states that If you have two sons, one from a loved wife and the other from an unloved wife, and the son from the unloved is the firstborn, you still need to give him double the inheritance of the younger son. This law does not include daughters. The Torah says: 

“If a householder has two wives, one loved and the other unloved, and both the loved and the unloved have borne him sons, but the first-born is the son of the unloved one— then he wills his property to his sons, he may not treat as first-born the son of the loved one in disregard of the son of the unloved one who is older. Instead, he must accept the first-born, the son of the unloved one, and allot to him a double portion of all he possesses; since he is the first fruit of his vigor, the birthright is his due.”  

(Deuteronomy 21:15-17)

Even though they are trying to be fair by making sure the law is followed despite the father’s views on the sons, the biblical law of giving your oldest son double inheritance is unfair because a person shouldn’t get more money just because of birth order and gender. This law is not all bad; it is good to not have favoritism, but I think it would be better if all the children got the same inheritance. The mitzvah protects favoritism in that it says not to give less inheritance to the child of an unloved wife, but reinforces favoritism by stating that the oldest child gets double inheritance.

When we read some of these laws, one might wonder how often they were actually put into place. Right now I’m talking about questionable laws from the past, but there are still many laws today that are worth questioning. For example, there is a lot of fighting right now about abortion. I think in a way it connects to my Torah portion. In my portion there is a law about taking female captives which states that if you go to war and take a female captive you wish to marry, you must cut her hair and let her nails grow out (to make her less attractive), then wait a month to decide whether you want to marry her or not. If you decide to, she will become your wife; but if you decide not to, you send her out on her own (and don’t sell her into slavery). 

Like with anti-abortion laws, the woman has no control over her body and what will happen to her in her future. In the Torah portion, the male captor gets to change her looks and choose the female captive’s future; with abortion laws, primarily male dominated governments are choosing whether females are forced to have children (even though many times they are teenagers, in poverty, or simply don’t want to be forced into parenthood). I think many times when people look back on these old texts and present these wrongdoings, we look at them to judge the actions of our ancestors, while often not observing how this carries over to our lives.

I’d like to thank my family for travelling all the way here and for being such a wonderful and supportive family, especially my grandparents and uncles and aunts and cousins. I’d like to thank my great aunt for being here on Zoom. I’d also like to thank my friends and the congregation for being here. I’d like to thank my parents for always loving me unconditionally and supporting my dreams, no matter what those are. Finally, thank you to the rabbi for teaching me, which I know must have been a lot of hard work. 

Josephine’s D’var Torah

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All of you – or at least most of you – heard me read my Torah portion earlier. My Torah portion, Bamidbar, is mainly a census: G-d tells Moses and Aaron to count up all the Israelites who can fight so that they can form an army. The part that I read is about how G-d declares that the Levites will serve G-d instead of the firstborn males as is traditional. There are more firstborn than Levites, so some families pay to buy back their firstborn.That part is often referred to as the redemption of the firstborn.

My haftorah portion, on the other hand, is basically a long metaphor comparing how Hoseah’s wife Gomer was unfaithful to him to how the Israelites were unfaithful to G-d by worshiping idols. G-d wants the people to stop and atone for their misdeeds.

These two portions seem to have nothing to do with each other, but there is a commonly made connection between them: at the beginning of Hosea, there’s a line that says that the people of Israel will be innumerable whereas, in Bamidbar, they are clearly numbered. (Well, the ones who can fight, at least.) I have managed to connect them in another way: redemption.

As part of writing this d’var, I looked at several different definitions of the word redemption. The three most common ways that I have found to interpret redemption are, first, making up for something bad one has done (so basically atonement), second, deliverance from sin, or third, buying something back, which is the case in Bamidbar. The first two both apply to Hosea: The Israelites are told to seek redemption, and G-d is willing to deliver the Israelites from sin.

I read a lot, and some of the books I’ve read have types of redemption in them. For instance, in Starless by Jacqueline Carey, one of the characters is a bodyguard whose charge dies in his care. Vironesh, the character, wants to redeem himself from that mistake. In that case, redemption is synonymous with atonement.

In The Raconteur’s Commonplace Book, by Kat Milford, a character defines redemption as “turn from evil, return to good”, also like atonement. I suppose redemption in the financial sense doesn’t come up as often in the books I read.

I also found several official definitions of atonement. Oxford Languages says that it means either (1) the act of saving or being saved from sin or (2) the action of regaining possession of something in exchange for payment, or the clearing of a debt.

My pocket dictionary defines the verb redeem as one of five possibilities (1) buy back (2) pay off (3) turn in for a prize (4) free, as from sin (5) aone for. Etymonline, a website where one can find out the origins of words, says that redemption comes from a Latin word meaning “a buying back or off, a releasing, or a ransoming”. In the mid-14th century, it was taken to mean “deliverance from sin”. 

To be honest, I hadn’t expected there to be so many different definitions of redemption. Before learning all of this, I mainly thought of redemption as a synonym for atonement. Did any of you know all of the things redemption can mean?

All of the information I’ve gathered seems to come to this conclusion: Redemption can often mean to buy something back, to atone for an action you have committed, or to be freed from the consequences of that action. The mentions of it in the Tanakh, whether it uses the actual word or not, show that it has been an important thing for a long time, and will continue to be.

Now, I would like to ask you a few questions. For one, how do you define redemption? Have you ever thought about it? Have you ever bought something back, or tried to atone for a mistake you’ve made, or been freed from the consequences of something regrettable that you’ve done? You don’t have to say anything aloud, but please take a few minutes to think about it.

Thank you for listening. I hope this helps you to notice what significance redemption has in your lives.

Dylan Schnorr’s Dvar Torah

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Shabbat Shalom! My Torah portion is from the book of Numbers. At this point, the Israelites are wandering in the desert. Before this time, the Israelites were slaves in Egypt. They were beaten and made to do harsh physical labor.  Moses then led the Israelites to freedom with the help of God, who rained plagues on Pharaoh which, in the end, forced him to release the Israelites. They fled into the desert and had to leave with their bread unleavened because they were in such a hurry. 

This is the Passover story, the one that most of us are familiar with. My Torah portion takes place after the Israelites have escaped from Egypt. While wandering in the desert, the Israelites eventually ran out of food. When they complained about how they would starve in the desert, God decided to give them Manna. The Torah says that Manna would collect on the ground like dew or frost, and would melt away when the sun heated up. The people would collect it and make bread, and they would have to eat this bread that same day because it would spoil by the next. This made them uncertain about when they would get food. But the Israelites now complained about the Manna, saying that they wanted meat. God then decided to teach them a lesson.  He rained quails on top of them. In the Torah it says that even the people who gathered the least had 10 homers of quail, which is equivalent to 475 pounds, or about 1900 birds. When the people who were complaining ate the meat, they were struck with a deadly plague that killed them. 

My speech today could be about their ingratitude: the Israelites were being ungrateful for the Manna that God gave them. They were getting food from heaven, but they were complaining about not having meat. But I noticed something else in the story about Manna that made me want to talk about a different topic.  This is what the Torah says (and I quote): “The Israelites felt a craving for real food. They wept and said, “If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish that we used to eat freely in Egypt, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic. Now our throats are shriveled. There is nothing at all! Nothing but the manna to look to!” 

In my opinion their complaining wasn’t just an example of ingratitude. I think it was also because of nostalgia. They were thinking that maybe Egypt wasn’t all that bad.  When they were in Egypt, they would get small worthless fish that the fishermen would throw to them for helping with the nets. But they looked back on it, remembering only times when they got what they wanted, or when they were happy. Perhaps there were things to miss about their time in Egypt, like sometimes getting rewards for their labor, or being able to eat meat. But those times were few and far between, and those small benefits didn’t compare to freedom.  

I think the Israelites were experiencing powerful nostalgia about having left Egypt. In the Oxford dictionary, nostalgia is defined as a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past. Nostalgia can change your views of the past, especially when the present is so insecure.  I believe the reason that they were yearning for the past was because the present time they were in wasn’t easy, so it made the time before seem better than it was. Life in the desert was incredibly hard and, on top of that, they didn’t really know where they were going and when they would get there. Maybe they missed their small freedoms, like routine, or being in one place. It is possible that in this moment, they looked back and Egypt looked better.

I‘d like to talk today about  how nostalgia can affect us. I think that nostalgia has two sides, a good one and a bad one. On the good side, nostalgia can help in preserving older things, older ways of doing things, like a bar mitzvah, and keeping ways of life that are healthy for you. For example, running because you want the same physical body that you had when you were younger, or going on a diet for the same reason.  Nostalgia can also help you to remember people or events that are dear to you – things you can see in photographs or in memorials, and those memories can motivate you to do similar or better things yourself.

But nostalgia can also have a bad side. It can cause you to hurt yourself trying to do things you could do before, like trying to lift too much weight when working out.  In a broader sense, nostalgia can hurt other people when you try to restore something from the past that might not have been as good as you remember. 

We know that nostalgia can be very intense. It can distort your view of your current situation, or it might change how you look at the thing you’re feeling nostalgic for. Maybe you can even feel nostalgic for slavery, a time that you probably had a bad experience in because the time you are in now is unpredictable, with you uncertain about what will happen next.

I have experienced this type of nostalgia as well. When I was younger, I lived in Massachusetts. I really enjoyed my life there, but eventually we moved here in 2019. The first couple years were rough, I had to deal with COVID shortly after moving. I hadn’t adjusted completely to Michigan, so I missed Massachusetts so much more. I eventually got over it, but I still sometimes look back fondly. Now I’ll be going to a completely new high school next year. This may be challenging, but like the Israelites, I have to focus on the future, not just the past, and keep moving forward.

Something I gained from this Torah portion is that nostalgia can have a big impact, both good or bad, and your perspective on the past can change without you knowing it.  When you remember something, it isn’t always exactly as you thought it was. Human memories can easily be seen in a rosy light.  This is something that the Israelites had to struggle with in the desert.  One way for the Israelites to deal with this nostalgia was to try to remember their goals, and to focus on the future, not the past. Their lives in the desert might be very painful for them.  But, in the long run, it would bring freedom and a better life to their children and grandchildren.  Even when they were nostalgic about Egypt, most of the Israelites went on.  They didn’t get trapped by their memories.  Instead they kept going. This was a good decision, because if they had gone back or stayed in the desert, they would have made no progress. I guess what I’m trying to say is, the Israelites could progress only moving forward and not overly thinking about the past.

Can you think of any  time in your life where you have experienced nostalgia about something that you remember  more fondly than it really was? How might that have affected the way you moved into the future?  

So for me, that is a lesson that my Torah portion teaches.  We shouldn’t forget our past, but we should also look to the future. Thank you

Mollie Meadow’s Dvar Torah: Shmot

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Shabbat Shalom and thank you for attending my Bat Mitzvah. I have a few special thanks to tender. First of all, I would like to thank Marcy Epstein for her leadership in my early Jewish learning. I would also like to thank Elisabeth and Neil Epstein for helping me learn the torah and haftorah blessings, Rabbi Eliott for welcoming me into the Jewish community with the Brit Shalom and for working with me and my family to craft a wonderful Bat Mitzvah service, and most of all, I want to thank Molly Kraus-Steinmetz – who will always be Big Molly to me – for tutoring me, her first student, in Torah, and for baby-sitting me when I was young.

This weeks’ parsha starts at the very beginning of Exodus. Joseph’s generation of Hebrews in Egypt has died out, and a new Pharaoh has ascended to the throne- a Pharaoh who never knew Joseph and his significance to the past Pharaoh.

Pharaoh says “Let us deal shrewdly with him, so that he may not increase; otherwise in the event of war he may join our enemies in fighting against us and rise from the ground.” That is a translation of one of the lines in my portion. First, notice that Pharaoh uses the term “he” to refer to the Hebrews, rather than the plural; “them.” In a healthy societal culture, humans must be recognized as such, not as being one indiscernible mass. If we recognize people as individuals, only then can we respect them enough to treat them as fellow humans, worthy of respect and love. There might have even been intermarriage and a merging of peoples between the Egyptians and the Hebrews, much as took place between the French and Anishinaabeg in Michigan. You can’t intermarry with “him,” but you can intermarry with “them.”

            Earlier, in line seven, it says, “but Israel’s sons bore fruit and swarmed and multiplied and proliferated greatly, greatly so the land was filled with them.” You might notice the choice of the word swarm. Swarm like animals, like mice, like mosquitoes, like- dare I say- frogs, lice, flies, and locusts? This again comes back to what sort of becomes a theme of treating the Hebrews as less than human.

One question I’d like to ask you is, at what point do poor conditions become less than human? At what point does treatment become inhuman? For those of you that attended Brenna’s Bat Mitzvah, she talked about the meaning of enoughness; but when does less than enoughness become less than human?

Isaac Meadow’s Dvar Torah: Shmot

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Greetings, friends, family, and congregants. Thank you for coming, and Shabbat Shalom. I wish also to extend my thanks to Deb Kraus, Drake Meadow, Nancy Meadow, Rabbi Elliot and everyone here who supported me.

            Today’s parashah, or Torah portion, is Shmot, or “Names;” it consists of the first part of Exodus. Pharaoh was afraid of a Hebrew uprising, so he ordered all of the Hebrew boys dumped in the Nile. A Hebrew woman saved her child Moses, (remember him, he becomes important later); after floating down the Nile in a basket, he is rescued by an Egyptian princess. He grew up an Egyptian, though probably with some sense of Hebrew identity, as well. After killing an Egyptian to defend a Hebrew, he fled to the desert. At a well in the Sinai desert, he defended the daughters of a priest named Jethro from ruffians. Jethro married one of his daughters to Moses, and, as Jethro’s son-in-law, he tended the flocks.

One day, he saw something very strange – a bush that was burning but was not being consumed. God called “Moses, Moses,” from the bush. After explaining to Moses that he will bring the Hebrews out of Egypt, God then orders Moses to go back to Egypt as his messenger. Moses asks what name he should give, if the Hebrews ask for God’s name. Up to this point, God has been speaking rather strangely, repeating words, and speaking about seeing things. But now, He says something even stranger. His name, he says, is Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh, meaning “I will be who I will be.’  This is often translated as, “I am who I am.” Which is the better translation? In biblical Hebrew, there are only two tenses, perfect tense and imperfect tense. The perfect tense means that the action is complete. The imperfect means that it is not yet complete. This does not mean that god is flawed, it means that he is ever-changing; like fire. Since humans are made in the image of God, we share in this fiery potentiality, and are drawn and fascinated by it. 

Why does God name his essence as unfinished, as something still in process? Why does he appear to the eye as something insubstantial, and shapeless, as fire?

When Moses sees the burning bush, he experiences this basic instinctual attraction, but he also now experiences the intellectual attraction of curiosity – how can a human understand a fire that consumes no fuel?  I also see this as a small flex, showing Moses that he is powerful by burning something without consuming it. This is him showing supernatural powers.

Humans also literally burn without actually being consumed; in the process of using the sugar, glucose, the mitochondria take in food and burn it very slowly. We use the energy to live. 

We have had a sensory experience, an intellectual experience, but there is also a spiritual part of this. Does everyone think that fire is spiritually important? It’s important in other religions; In the New Testament, the holy spirit comes down at Pentecost as tongues of flame.

Zoroastrianism, an Iranian religion that has its most important texts in the “Avesta,” also has fire as an important part of their faith. Ahura Mazda, their god of light and goodness has an altar that eternally burns and is considered to be the visible presence of Ahura Mazda.

What can that mean for the spiritual practitioner now? 

1.     Savor the moment because life is always changing.

2.     Expect the unexpected.

3.     Understand that your essence is change, you are unfinished. Don’t get frozen in one place. As Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose last name was given to me as my middle name, said about the readiness to embrace change in yourself: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.”  

Thank you all for listening.

Brenna Reichman’s Dvar Torah From Her Bat Mitzvah on December 10th, 2022

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Hi everyone! 

So, picking up where I left off with the introduction to today’s torah portion. Jacob and Esau have come back together twenty years after the “birthright incident”. Jacob arrives with his large family and with his gifts of goats, sheep, camels, and cows. 

I’m going to share my version of the exchange that ensues:

Esau: Is all of this yours?

Jacob: Yes! It is to find favor in your eyes. (Or, I don’t want you to kill me!)

Esau: I have enough, brother. Let what is yours be yours. (Or, I don’t need your stuff!)

Jacob: No, please. If I have truly found your favor, accept these gifts. For seeing your face is like seeing the face of G-d. G-d has been gracious to me and I have everything.

(Or, I really really don’t want you to kill me!)

Esau accepts the gifts. 

Both of the brothers declare here that they have enough, and my theme today is enoughness. First, I will offer a couple of interpretations from the rabbinic commentary and then I will share some of my own reflections.

First, what does enough mean to Jacob and Esau in this exchange?

Rashi, who was alive about 1000 years ago, differentiated the ways that the two brothers spoke of their enoughness. Jacob said, I have everything, meaning all that I need. While Esau said, I have an abundance, suggesting a greed for more than he needs. But, in the same breath, Esau says, “let what is yours be yours.” Rashi says of this that Esau conceded the blessings to Jacob. To me this suggests the opposite of greed. But Esau can both lean towards greed, and desire reconciliation with his brother. Aren’t we humans all a bit complex. 

Another medieval rabbi known as Radak had a slightly different take. When Esau said, “let what is yours be yours”, Esau is trying to convey that he had not suffered as a result of Jacob receiving their father’s blessing.

Another source I used was a gift I got myself during my preparations, The Torah: A Women’s Commentary. Here, one of Jacob’s insistences is translated as, please accept my gift of blessing. This is interpreted as, please take my blessing, by which Jacob may be trying to compensate for having stolen the blessing from Esau twenty years ago. However, to me, this seems very much like a sorry-not-sorry move. Jacob doesn’t regret what happened. He never outright apologizes. But he does seem to want to reconcile, or at least to not be killed.

And the last rabbinic commentary I will share today is from Rabbi David Teutsch, a reconstructionist rabbi who is still alive today. In A Guide to Jewish Practice – Everyday Living, he writes on the topic of consumption, or to me, material enoughness. Here he acknowledges that there is a place for consumption to add pleasure to daily living. As long as we don’t compromise our financial security or the greater public good, nor undermine our ability to give tzedaka, which is defined as charitable giving with an eye towards justice. I found this commentary on the idea of enough, more relevant to our lives today.

Now on to my reflections.

I started out on this intellectual project thinking that I would be able to come up with a definition of what is enough, and how to live my life in that place of enoughness. By which I mean, what size house should I live in, how much of my income or savings should I donate, how should I make decisions about purchases for things I need versus things I want. And what about my carbon footprint. I have so many questions about how to live in a way that doesn’t hurt others. I know in my heart that my too-much, is someone else’s not-enough. But of course there’s no right answer to these questions. This is the stuff of being an adult and striving to be a good planetary citizen.

But still, I can’t get this question out of my head. What does it mean to have enough? For Jacob and Esau it meant many wives, handmaids and children (insert feminist commentary here), as well as livestock, and servants (insert human rights commentary here). Perhaps it also meant reconciliation. But what does it mean for me, or for us, today, in this time and place? Side note and full disclosure, I just bought tickets to Cancun for spring break. But back to my existential musings on enoughness.

For those of you that don’t know, I’m a nurse practitioner, and one of my jobs is at the sole women’s prison in Michigan, which is about a 15 minute drive south of us, in Ypsilanti. I think my work in a prison setting leaves my mind especially unsettled in the enoughness department. I’m going to share a few moments from my day this past Monday.

I was working in one of the clinics that is located within a housing unit. In the background, officers are yelling “one at a time in the bathroom”, and “get out of your doorway”. At that moment I thought enoughness would be unencumbered access to a bathroom for all those people who are incarcerated. I also thought enoughness for me would be working in an environment without yelling and humans being hostile to other humans.

That same day I overheard an officer asking a new arrival if she meant to put herself as her emergency contact. She replied, I don’t have anyone. What would enough look like for her?

Also on Monday, I was performing a routine exam, and the patient said, “that’s really nice that you do these exams in here”. I replied, of course! There’s a lot of care I can’t get for you, but this I can do. She was essentially thanking me for doing my job. In that moment, was I her enough?

This is how most days are at the prison. This level of in-your-face need.

Life in the prison is often about survival. I can’t count the number of times one of the people who are incarcerated has said to me, “I don’t want to die in here”.

All of this leads me to more questions:

Why do I get to thrive when so many that I come into contact with are merely surviving? 

For those of us that are comfortable and our survival is taken for granted, how do we define our enough? 

What does it mean to have too much and acknowledge that we are not special or deserving but to still have it?

We are prone to comparing ourselves to others, which further muddles the search for answers to these questions. Just as Jacob and Esau were comparing and competing in the exchange about the gifts. There is a sense that each was trying to say, no, I have more than you.

Reflecting on the prison environment lays bare all the different parts of enough: the array of needs we humans have, from the physiologic to the psychologic.

Let us contemplate on this for a moment:

Food, water, warmth, shelter.

Safety, health.

Social needs, friends, family, partners, community.

Financial security.

The need to be respected, valued by others, and feel that we are contributing meaningfully.

The need to learn and expand our knowledge.

Connecting with nature. 

Spiritual needs.

Creative expression, music, art.

For the people I come into contact with at the prison, to have a chance to survive and thrive would mean enough access to housing, education, access to child care, addiction treatment, lives free from violence, a society free from racial biases, their freedom, and much more. 

Now, as is customary in our congregation, I will pause to hear from some of you. Here is my question, but feel free to comment on anything I’ve said. 

In a world where so many people can barely survive, under what conditions is it okay to thrive?

Thank you for your contributions. I would love to continue this conversation with each of you in the months and years ahead of us.

I’m going to end with a quote that resonated with me. I found this from Ellen Dannin in a Reconstructing Judaism blog post. (And side note, it says in her bio that she is a former member of the Ann Arbor Hav!) She writes:

“What we ought to be concerned with is not material possessions – though we should be grateful for them. Rather, our real focus ought to be relieving suffering, being diligent about the obligation to live in a Godly way, being grateful for the good things that come our way while not assuming we deserve them, and instilling these understandings in the next generation.”

In other words, giving thanks and giving back.

And I think for today, this is enough.

Joey Ball’s Dvar Torah

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Welcome everyone. I have put this speech together in order to teach you about my
Torah portion and to help you learn something new. My Torah portion is called Naso. It
is in the Book of Numbers, and my haftorah is from the Book of Judges.

The Torah portion of Naso has several topics that don’t seem to fit together. It talks
about how the Levites were special, and their job was to set up the mishkan every night
when the Israelites found a camp. The mishkan was the tabernacle, the sanctuary for
God, like a portable synagogue. Naso also talks about how wives who have cheated on
their significant others have to be forced to drink water that has a scroll of this law
dissolved into it, and if the woman is innocent she will be ok, but if she is guilty, she will
die a painful and slow death. Another thing this parsha talks about is the Nazirites, who
take oaths to never cut their hair, never touch anything that comes from a grapevine or
drink wine, and never touch a human corpse. Finally, this parsha gives the priestly
blessings, which are still said today by parents over their children at Shabbat.

I’m actually not going to be talking about any of these topics today, though. I’m going to
be talking about Samson and Nachshon, who are both biblical heroes that are briefly
mentioned in my Torah and Haftorah portions. Samson appears at the end of my
haftorah, and Nachshon appears towards the end of my Torah portion.

Samson was born in ancient Israel in the tribe of Dan to Manoah and Zealophonis. An
angel predicted that Samson would be born and would be a savior of the Jews against
their enemies, the Philistines. Samson’s parents raised him with the blessing of the

Eternal, and a razorblade was to never touch his head. Samson was extremely strong.
When he was young, he was attacked by a lion and killed it with his bare hands. There
are many stories about him killing Philistines in different ways. But his downfall was that
even though he hated Philistine soldiers, he had a thing for Philistine women. He met
Delilah and married her, and she kept asking for the way to take away his strength.
When she finally wore him down, he told her that cutting his hair would make him weak.
She cut off his hair in the middle of the night while he was sleeping, and then Philistine
soldiers captured him, gouged his eyes out and tied him to a pillar. He asked God to
give him one last burst of strength, and then he tore down the pillars, killing thousands
of Philistines along with himself. Samson stood up for the Jewish people against the
Philistines, which was heroic, but he was obsessed with Philistine women and killed
thousands of Philistines, which in modern times would be horrible, but back then it was
considered heroic.
Nachshon ben Aminadav was the brother of Aaron’s wife in ancient Egypt. He was a
descendent of Judah. When Moses led the Jewish people out of Egypt, they came to
the sea, and God told Moses to raise his staff. But nothing happened. The people were
terrified, because Egyptian soldiers were coming for them, and they would be enslaved
again. So Nachshon came out of the crowd. His family and friends said, “What are you
doing?” but he started walking into the sea. First his knees, then chest, then nostrils,
and the second the water was above his head, the sea parted. The Israelites were able
to cross because the sea was now a pathway. Of course, now they had to wander the
desert for forty years. But Nachshon was a hero who saved the Israelites from getting

enslaved again. Nachshon showed the courage of his faith. He fully trusted God to
save the Israelites. He was a type of hero that not many people know about.

What makes someone a hero? A hero is sometimes a real person, but more often
they’re a character in a movie or a book who people look up to for their actions.
Sometimes a hero can be motivated by personal reasons, like wanting to save a family
member or friend from danger. Sometimes a hero can be motivated by a desire for
fame. A hero often performs a heroic action because there’s no one else to do it.
Sometimes, when a hero steps up, people look up to the hero and want to make the
hero their leader, but the hero doesn’t necessarily want the responsibility of being a
leader, and can run away from that responsibility.

What makes a leader different from a hero? A leader always has the people’s interests
at heart. A leader might give their people what they need to survive, like food or shelter,
or might protect people from a threat. A leader might not put themselves in harm’s way
in the same way that a hero does, because the leader is thinking about the needs of the
people, and the people might be stuck if they end up without a leader. Sometimes
leaders are hard to find, because leading takes a lot of work, and can be stressful. A
leader might sometimes do heroic acts, but it’s the people and their needs that are most
motivating to a leader.

So if I was going to apply these ideas to the heroic characters in my Torah and Haftarah
portions, we could say that Samson was both a hero and a leader. He was a leader in

the sense that when the Israelites needed someone to defend them, Samson stepped
up to fight for them. Although Samson was very strong, magically strong, he was also
vulnerable when he wasn’t being helped by God. Ultimately, his actions were probably
more heroic than leadership-focused, because he killed himself in order to get revenge,
which meant he wasn’t thinking about the Israelites’ long-term needs.

Samson spent his life doing heroic deeds, but Nachshon was a hero for one moment.
Nachson was a hero because he jumped into the ocean without thinking. He didn’t
really think about himself, he thought about the needs of his people. Because of his
actions, the Israelites were able to escape from slavery. Like Samson, Nachshon was
willing to sacrifice himself for his people, but he did it out of faith and trust in God and
because he saw that someone needed to step up and act.

Nachshon and Samson are both examples of long-ago heroes. Their stories are
interesting and even exciting, but in today’s world, I think we need more leaders than
heroes. Heroes do helpful things in the moment, but leaders are thinking more long-
term about the needs of the people. Some of the issues that our world needs more
leadership around is conflict, like Russia’s war on Ukraine. If Putin was a better leader,
and was actually thinking about the needs of his people, he wouldn’t have invaded
Ukraine. Another issue that it would be helpful to have better leadership around is
COVID. And not just one leader to keep us as healthy as possible – we probably need
multiple leaders working together, both within the United States and across the world.

In general, we need leaders who are able to work well with groups and listen to the
needs of the people. They need to be flexible, and not assume that they have the right
answers themselves. They need to be able to collaborate. They need to be able to
come together to see people’s shared needs, and come up with plans to meet those
needs.

Bass Dieve’s Dvar Torah

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Hello, I’m Bass and I have a few subjects to touch upon in this speech. I’ll also have you know, I have many pages of notes so this might take a few minutes :-). I’ll be going over all sorts of things, like: questions about god, what the different darknesses man, the perception of idols, and even some loopholes I found in the Torah about them.

Just real quick, a summary of my parasha is: The people of Israel get to mount Sinai, we
receive the 10 commandments from god, and god tell us all of the things were not allowed to worship. 

Now that I’ve summarized the Parasha, I want to ask, why does God have as much power as God does? Well because God is God, because God is powerful, I do agree that God has a lot, but I feel like a bit of that Power comes from the mystery we experience.  For example, how we don’t have a gender for god, or a physical form and that God is beyond human understanding. Humans can’t comprehend things without physical form, so your guess could be as good as mine. Does God’s  power come from the Mystery in and of itself? Or does it come from our human limitations? We remain in a constant wonder about God’s mysterious Power. That is the nature of human “unknowing”. 

My tutor Sarah has encouraged me to ask another key question. Is it possible to feel close to and in awe of God at the same time? I would say yes because, I’m sure there are people who are far away that many of us look up to, for example a musician, but you may feel close to them because you may resonate with their music, or they might have some of the same experiences as you. An even better example is your parents, most of you look up to them with awe, while having a close connection with them as well. That is why I think you can feel close to and in awe of god at the same time.

Now about idolatry – a central theme in my Parsha.  Idolatry is basically the worship of a physical object as a god. Judaism also prevents worshipping an artistic representation of god. What about other religions that have deities like Hinduism and Buddhism? We have many statues in our house of Ganesh and Buddha. Does this mean we are worshipping idols? I don’t think so because we have them just to appreciate the teachings they represent, but others may disagree. You can appreciate an object without worshipping it. Like my books. I love them and admire them on my shelf, but they are not gods and deserving of worship.
 
And from that idea I want to talk about, how does idolatry help or hurt us? As for helping, I think that having a higher being to look up to is reassuring in a way. Because you feel like someone’s there for you, helping you, encouraging you, with everything you want to do. As for cons, some people take it too far, saying that “god wants me to do this, so cooperate or be punished”. So I think that it helps you as long as you don’t use it to oppress others. Idolatry is mistaking the creation of God for the Creator, and elevating a part of creation to a Divinity.

And what about polytheism? The Torah emphasizes one God only but  why is having multiple gods bad? On the one hand, gods are worshipped since they seem to sponsor or create bad things, like gods of war, or gods of famine, that ravage the land, but on the other hand, there are gods like gods of seasons, and gods of harvest as well. In one way polytheism makes sense because there is a deity who is in charge of all different aspects of the world. But the early Israelites rejected that and said that one God is in charge.

And if God is One, can God also be Many, including many aspects of the Universe? Including male and female? Can we refer to God as “they” rather than “He” “She” or other names? Does that make sense even when the Shma emphasizes “Ehad” or “one” One? In my conversation with My rabbi, we discussed the pluses and minuses of using “They” for God as a non-binary Being, but I’ll get back to that very soon.

Something I would like to quickly touch up upon is how all is one yet separate at the same time. We are all separate because we are all different from each other, in our own unique ways, yet we all end up being one because, we all trace back to 1 place, like this person was born from this person and this person was born from this person, and so on. But we’re all connected in ways, even if it’s small, like, we have brown hair, it can all be traced back to the same origin. It’s really cool if you think about it.

Now about the Shma – here is the famous verse in the Torah that signals that there is really only One God, And here we’re also getting back to the they /them theme. The translation is: Hear, O Israel: The lord is our god, the lord is one. But on the note of the lord is one, that’s singular, but so are they/them pronouns, I prefer to think of god as androgynous, but people like to genderize god, but saying they can still mean 1 person, for example if someone goes by they/them, that does doesn’t mean that they are multiple people, they just don’t identify as male or female. There are also different perspectives in the shma. The first part, here o Israel can be thought of being said from 1) the whole world, 2) The People of Israel, or 3) God. The second part is, the lord is our god. That would be from the perspective of the people of Israel. And the final part is the lord is one, which i would say, is in the perspective of god, saying it to the land.

One of the most amazing sections of my Parsha included a description of the Revelation of God’s word coming from Mt. Sinai but with an emphasis on Darkness. This interested me. In the very first section, it says: And the mountain burned up with fire up to the heavens, with darkness, a cloud, and opaque darkness. I find it very interesting how they list off different types of darkness, i think that’s because they don’t want to exclude any type of darkness, like for example it can be dark, but that darkness can be very dark, like midnight is a lot darker than 9 oclock, so you can see how those are different types of darkness, so something could happen in one type of darkness but not the other, so that’s why I think they listed off multiple types.

Now finally, the loopholes! I found two in my Torah portion, the first one is in verse 16, which states: Lest you become corrupt and make for YOURSELF a graven image. Which i found very interesting, they easily could have just taken out yourself, or substituted it, but they chose not to, so technically you could make it for someone else. The second one in verse 18 says: The likeness of anything that CRAWLS (it’s saying what you can’t make statues of Btw) which can be up for loose translation. You could easily say, well, anything that walks crawls the earth, but that’s not our definition of it. We think of it as anything that walks on four legs, mainly bugs or insects, but they could have said, anything that’s on the ground in general, so technically you could make an image of a kangaroo or a Monkey.

Now for the very last thing, I promise. I would really like to thank each and every one of you for going out of your way to be here and celebrate with me in these difficult times. It means so much to me. On top of the bar mitzvah, we’re moving to Switzerland in 6 days. It’s been really stressful to have both of these big life events happen at once. I’ve been working for the past year on this, and it’s been really hard, yet fun and rewarding. I’ve learned how to read Hebrew, sing and decipher prayers, and think critically about religion and torah, as well as just have a good time being a Jew. 

This concludes my speech, thank you all for listening and being a part of my bar mitzvah day.

Miles Hall’s Dvar Torah: Emor

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Miles Hall at his Zoom Bimah

Shabbat shalom, and hello everyone. The Torah portion that we’re reading from this week is Emor, which is in the book of Leviticus. 

Emor primarily gives laws for priests serving in the traveling tent of God in the wilderness, known as the Mishkan. Emor also tells the Israelites which people are not allowed to serve as priests, such as people with physical disabilities. The Torah portion also recounts how to observe Holy Days such as Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, and Sukkot. It gives instructions on holy items for use in the Mishkan as well as animal sacrifices. Emor also is the place in the Torah where we learn that we are not allowed to say the most sacred name of God out loud, and what happens if we do. Finally, Emor teaches us about the law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

My aliyah, the part of the Torah that I chanted, was from the last portion of Emor, and I will be discussing one part of it in depth. In this part God is telling Moses how to respond to a man who blasphemed, meaning he pronounced the name of God in vain. It says:

And the LORD spoke to Moses, saying:
Take the blasphemer outside the camp; and let all who were within hearing lay their hands upon his head, and let the whole community stone him.
And to the Israelite people speak thus: Anyone who blasphemes his God shall bear his guilt;
if he also pronounces the name LORD, he shall be put to death. The whole community shall stone him; stranger or citizen, if he has thus pronounced the Name, he shall be put to death.
If anyone kills any human being, he shall be put to death.
If anyone maims his fellow, as he has done so shall it be done to him:
fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. The injury he inflicted on another shall be inflicted on him.
You shall have one standard for stranger and citizen alike: for I the LORD am your God.
Moses spoke thus to the Israelites. And they took the blasphemer outside the camp and pelted him with stones. The Israelites did as the LORD had commanded Moses.

My aliyah presents two laws that on the surface seem to contradict each other. First, it says how if you speak the name of God in vain – that is, blaspheme – then everyone in the camp is commanded to stone you to death. It’s not just that a blasphemer is punished with death, but that everyone has to participate in his killing, like a ceremony — which to me sounds very gruesome and like overkill. 

But then, in the very next sentence, it says that if you kill a human, you shall be put to death. 

If we take both laws literally as they’re stated in the Torah and try to follow them both, then it seems like it would mean that everyone should be put to death, because everyone would have been responsible for stoning to death the person who blasphemed.

Maybe that’s too literal a reading of what’s going on here. Maybe whoever wrote this part of the Torah thought that it would be obvious that the rule of ‘a life for a life’ doesn’t apply if you’ve been commanded to carry out divine punishment. And that of course humans need to question and interpret these laws to make sense of them.

But it sometimes feels like the Torah doesn’t really set us up to interpret it non-literally, because many times the Torah teaches a law but then doesn’t give a reason for the law. 

I get frustrated that we don’t get an explanation for why a law exists. Basically, it seems like the question of ‘why do we do this’ is answered with ‘because God says so.’

As Jews, the Torah is our ‘primary source.’ It’s the basic text that we engage with. But what if it says things that we don’t agree with now?

Throughout Jewish history, many Jews have wrestled with these questions. The rabbis of the Mishnah and Talmud spent all their time questioning what God was actually wanting us to do, rather than what was written in the commandments.

Nowadays, Reconstructionism is both a denomination and an approach to Judaism that is similar to what these ancient rabbis did. Reconstructionism allows us to wrestle with our received traditions and commandments and not throw them out altogether. This allows us to still cling to the cultural, philosophical, and moral aspects of Judaism. 

Why would we want to do that? Because it allows us to stay connected to the past and to the practices of our ancestors. And it seems like it would be wrong to discard our most basic text just because we happen to not believe in all parts of it right now. It’s comforting to have what seems like the best of both worlds, in which we can hold onto ancient beliefs and still believe in our contemporary morality.

Personally, I think that you can be Jewish and believe that the Torah is a collection of myths, rather than the literal word of God. It’s okay as a Jew to think of the Torah as a bunch of stories that people wrote, and it’s okay as a Jew to not believe that we need to follow the Torah literally. It’s okay to believe that the Torah is simply an important text that generates a lot of information and questions on how our ancestors perceived God and how we see God now.

We’re now going to discuss the three discussion questions included in the program. Please unmute yourself and respond to one or more of them:

a. Why do people feel the need to make the Torah metaphorical rather than just disagreeing with it outright?

b. The version of God in my Torah portion is a God with personality and feelings. But for many contemporary Jews, we think of God as a force. What do we do if the version of God in our received religious tradition isn’t the God that we believe in today? How do we reconcile these different versions of God? 

c. In my Torah portion it says: “You shall have one standard for stranger and citizen alike: for I the LORD am your God.” Why should we treat people the same because “God is God?” Why can’t it just be for ethical or rational reasons?

I’m glad that I could share my questions with you so that you question them too. Thank you for the great discussion.

To conclude, I want to say thank you to everybody that is here today to help me celebrate and everybody that helped me get here. I want to say thank my Hebrew tutor Deb, who helped me master my aliya and haftarah. And I want to thank Rabbi Ora, who helped me understand my parsha and answered my questions. I want to thank my parents who supported me through this process, and my family who is online today to help me celebrate. And finally to my friends, community, and the congregation for supporting me on the way. Thank you! And Shabbat shalom. 

Otto Nelson’s Bar Mitzvah Dvar: Chukat

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Shabbat Shalom, everyone!
Welcome to my bar mitzvah! I hope you’ve been enjoying it so far.
My torah portion is Chukat.
It’s a bit of an inconsistent portion, because it starts with Adonai (also known as G-d) detailing a purification ritual to be used after contact with the dead, which I am focusing on, but about a third of the way in it jumps to the story of the Israelites wandering through the wilderness.
The aliyah (section of Torah) I just read is Numbers, chapter 19, verses 18 to 22.
My aliyah focuses on the details of the purification ritual.
According to the Torah, this purification ritual is required after contact with a human body, grave, or bone.
It was believed that contact of this sort makes a person spiritually or ritually unclean.
Purification involves sprinkling water containing the ashes of a Red Heifer (mentioned earlier in my Torah portion) on the unclean person, after which they must wash themselves and their clothes and remain isolated from others for a period of 7 days.
If they do not undergo this ritual they are cut off from the congregation, a punishment known as Karet. Rabbis were and are not sure exactly what this punishment entails, but some theories are premature death, death without children, or generally very bad things.
On that happy note:
You may have noticed that these laws about death and contact with the dead seem very strict, and a bit strange, which brings up the question: Why were these laws created?
I think one reason is for the sake of physical purity (I’ll talk about that later), in that it helps avoid the spread of disease. However, I think it was mainly for religious purity. I think the ritual was designed to keep the perceived sanctity of the congregation by acknowledging the dead but not allowing them to negatively impact the community.
However, I think now we should look at what other people think the purpose of this ritual is, through rabbinical commentary. A traditional addition to a D’var torah, rabbinical commentary is essentially looking back at observations on the Torah portion made by past Jewish scholars to see what they think (Like looking at the comments on a YouTube video, except generally more positive and much older).
Rabbi Joseph Bechor Shor, a rabbi who lived in France in the 13th century, speculated that the purification ritual was to assist with physically letting go of the dead, and avoiding the practice of incorporating dead bodies into physical objects and adornments, a tradition among several neighboring tribes at the time and place the Torah was written. He also held that it is a natural tendency to physically cling to loved ones who have died, and that the ritual exists to warn Jews against this tendency. However, Rabbi Samson Hirsch, a 19th century German rabbi, claimed that the meaning was more symbolic, showing the Jewish people that there is a possibility of redemption from sin, such as the sin of touching a dead body.
Additionally, allow me to note that Rabbi Yochanan (A first century rabbi who saved Judaism in a super-dramatic way that should REALLY be made into an action film), Rabbi Isaac (A student of Yochanan), and Rabbi Joshua of Sikinin (A lesser-known Talmudic rabbi), believed that the ritual is not made to be understood or have a reason behind it.
Now, the reasons I just quoted are more spiritual reasons for this ritual,
but I also want to mention possible practical or medical reasons.
A possible medical reason for the ritual was to use water to wash off bacteria from the person and their clothes, which were possibly infected from diseases carried by dead bodies, and then put the person in a quarantine for any remaining germs or effects to die off.
Strange thing is, the biblical purification ritual in my Torah portion seems in line with modern medical practices. However, this is thousands of years before modern medicine. So how could the ritual use ideas similar to those of contemporary medical science?
Personally, I think that the connection is coincidental. After all, when we do something that works, we continue to do it. And in ancient times, the health benefits of certain rituals could be seen as divine signs to continue them.
At the core of this ritual is purity. But what is purity? Physical purity? Religious purity? And what do these things mean in today’s world?
Personally, I think that the idea of purity, both religious and physical, is really mostly a social construct. Although how clean or healthy you are can affect physical purity, I think what you and others think about you is most of what’s taken into account. And the case of religious purity is even more heavily opinion-focused.
In today’s world, purity does not seem to be as common a topic, at least not obviously. However, I think that these ideas of purity still exist, just in a more cloaked form. When people make decisions based on physical health or look, I think that’s really just a different form of the idea of physical purity. And when people make decisions based on what they think of another person’s religion or culture, I think that’s just another branch of the idea of religious or ethical purity.
But now to my mitzvah project.
Because my portion is focused on purity and purifying, for my project my friend Eli (who had his Bar Mitzvah last month) and I swept up the memorial garden behind the JCC, planted new plants, added mulch, and weeded it, in a way restoring natural purity to it. Also, my Mom and I worked with a community organization known as NAP herps that monitors frog and salamander populations, which are indicators of natural vibrancy and purity. Finally, my family and I planted 150-something native butterfly bushes in my grandparent’s land in west Michigan, to restore some natural, native purity.
Anyway…
At this point, I have discussed purity in today’s world, talked about my mitzvah project, asked a rhetorical question and then answered it, given the interpretations of rabbis over the centuries, and given medical and spiritual reasons for this ancient ritual. I know at this point ya’ll are probably getting hungry for the luncheon, and I relate, so I’ll make this quick.
In our congregation, it’s customary for the Bar or Bat Mitzvah to ask a question of the congregation (Don’t worry, this one’s not rhetorical), so here’s mine. Throughout my D’var torah, I’ve explored many questions about purity. But now I have a question about purity for you to discuss, and that’s “What does purity, and for that matter impurity, mean to you?”

Thank you for sharing your thoughts. And to conclude, I would like to thank everyone who has helped me reach where I am today.
Thank you to:
-My Dad, David Erik Nelson, and my Mom, Cara Jeanne Spindler for helping and supporting me throughout my Bar Mitzvah and my life.
-My little sister Aziza, for, uhh…
Hmm…
Teaching me, and pushing me to my limit of, patience and understanding…
-Linda, Mojo, Riley, Danny, Justin, Ava, Henry, Vince, Sarah, Hannah, and anyone else who lives outside of the state and were willing to take the time and effort to come here
-My tutor, Deb, for helping me through my torah and haftarah portions.
-Rabbi Ora, for helping with my D’var torah.
-Anyone who has supported me in my life, be it a friend, family member, pet…
-And finally, everyone who came here to my bar mitzvah today! Thank you all so much!