Rabbi’s Torah Thoughts

It is impossible to read this week’s Torah portion, Ki Teitzei, without thinking about the hostages.  The portion is dedicated to societal rules for warfare, beginning with the case of a woman who is being held captive.  She must be…

As the identities of the six bodies discovered in Rafa this past weekend were revealed, the Jewish world shook with anger.  After nearly a year in captivity, what did Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Ori Danino, Alex Lobanov, Carmel Gat, Almog…

In one of the stories included in the 1970s science fiction anthology “Wandering Stars”, creatures called Bulbas that look like, “brown pillows, all wrinkled and twisted, with some big gray spots on this side and on that side, and out of…

“Creating a World without Blemish” At the beginning of this week’s Torah portion, Chukat, we learn about a red heifer, that not only had to be completely red, but also without blemish, “she ein bah mum” (Numbers 19:2).  This was…

Last Saturday afternoon, Audrey Shine celebrated her Bat Mitzvah at CSS.  What made this particularly important not just to the Shine family, but to our entire CSS community, is that Audrey is the third generation of her family to become…

When we rise for the Barchu prayer on Friday Night, I often ask people to look around the room.  Then I say, “Each and every one of you is important to our service tonight.  Without you here, we would not…

This much we know; on October 7, at 6:30 in the morning that day Jerusalem time the attack began. Over 5,000 rockets were fired into Israel from Gaza in a span of 20 minutes. 2,900 Hamas militants stormed the border,…

The summer after eleventh grade, I worked at Camp Ramah in the Poconos. The camp was affiliated with the Conservative movement, but I considered myself Orthodox at the time. This often posed challenges for me over the course of the…

This past week, I drove down to Philadelphia to join colleagues in the Reform movement at our annual convention.  In preparing to leave on any journey, I find I am most nervous in the hours before I leave.  This is…

For Rabbi Hanan Schlesinger and Noar A’wad, the question of who their neighbors were was confusing and upsetting. Were their neighbors only the Israeli settler or Palestinian Arab communities they respectively lived amongst in the West Bank or were they…