A Quick Torah Thought

It is all so glaring.  The contrast between Noach who walked with God, and Avraham who walked before Him speaks volumes. Avraham prayed, Noach did not. We have no prayer that Noach cultivated or endowed humanity with. In the most dire of circumstances, it was his silent obedience and acquiescence more than anything that defined his legacy, one that seems to go hand in hand with the alcoholism that ensued later. One who believes in a change mentality doesn't fall to the depravity and despair of drunken nakedness and a feeling of a lack of control.  Yet, one thing that seems to need larger attention is that without Noach, there never would have been an Abraham. They don't necessarily represent opposing modalities to life, but rather evolutionary ones. Avraham was NOT chosen to save the world from the raging floods; that wasn't his essence or identity, and truth be told he wouldn't have been able to do it.  The same type of contrast is often used in Tanach classes to disti...

So much thought has gone into whether or not the world can be perfected, whether we're striving for a utopia, only magnifying the gravity of that first, almost primordial sin. A simple reading of the text, though, seems to point otherwise. In fact, so much of our life is linked to God's commands to Adam and Eve before they ate the forbidden fruit - from advancing the world and developing it - that truth be told I don't think anyone of us really wants to live forever.  A world in which time has no finiteness, where it stretches into infinity seems to be antithetical to the very message of the Torah, that we, the Jewish people have been chosen to make the most of our time, and use it to shape our values by prioritizing and triaging and deciding what's most important for us.  In the S heva Brachot , we do speak of a return to that world, an idyllic one, and yet it is only then that it has any significance in our waking consciousness, as opposed to our daily prayers which m...

You bet He does! Rashi on the last and final parsha of the Torah says that a king without servants is not a king. Which is why God needs us.  Then Hashem became King in Jeshurun, When the heads of the people assembled, The tribes of Israel together. But more poignantly, Rashi adds that Hashem can't be King of the Universe if the Jewish people are not united.  In Hebrew, yachad shivtei Yisrael ; if the Jewish people are fraught by conflict and unrest, and cannot come together, then Hashem ceases to rule over his world through the aegis of the Jewish people.  This is a very sad reality. One where the stature of the Jewish people declines, when we are not impervious to attack but rather susceptible to it, where the Jewish people are not looked up to but rather defamed and denigrated.  With Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur behind us - when Hashem was coronated over our people and the whole world - and Sukkot likewise receding into the past, may we remember the message of thes...

Eons ago, I was part of the first graduating class of the CUNY Honors College, which has since become the Macaulay Honors College. I had a professor there named Jerry Colonna who was a successful venture capitalist, turned life coach. I remember him sharing that periodically, he'd go on meditation retreats, leaving behind phone and laptop, only to be with himself in nature, without artifice, mediation or technological connectivity whatsoever.  At the time, I thought him strange. After all, he was supposedly very successful, and as an observant Jew, I could pray three times a day, and didn't need to go to Tibet, or any other far-off place for clarity of mind, and/or purpose.  Come to think of it though, in a certain respect, more than anything the holiday of Sukkot represents a sort of "Call of the Wild," or a return to deeper-seeded root. The holiday is the most important holiday of the year, as evidenced firstly by the sheer number of sacrifices ordered on each and e...

In an almost perverse way, what most engenders God's wrath in the Torah portion of Ha'azinu, "The Torah's song," is the remembrance that we are his sons. In each instance where God's anger flares, it is the fact that he expected more of us. On the flip-side, in the portion's lyrical verses, whenever God's mercy is piqued, it is because He remembers that we are His servants. This duality leaves us with a sense of puzzlement; one by one, the verses share a narrative rather different than the one that would intuitively come to mind. For example, "Hashem saw and was vexed, And spurned these sons and daughters ." And, the flip-side: "O nations, acclaim God’s people! For He’ll avenge the blood of His servants , Wreak vengeance on His foes, And cleanse His people’s land." Our servitude, the meanest level, represents the simple primacy of God's "bond" with mankind. He created the world because of a larger humanity;...

Over and over again, horrible tragedies have befallen our nation, from recent history to not so recent history, and the dynamic and personal narrative that helps our people go on has been more than anything, that the collective whole - God's providence over our nation - far trumps any consideration of the needs of any given individual.  Maybe, similar to an army, but on a deeper level, the promise to our forefathers was that Hashem would look after our people, that our people would always survive, regardless of the tragedy that could befall a community, a city or a town. Even on a larger level, the 10 nations of Israel were decimated, but Judah - after whom we are called Jews - survived.  That idea is very evident in the meeting Hashem held between Moshe Rabbeinu, the leader of our people, and Yehoshua, his spiritual heir; Hashem Himself convenes the meeting, and then first directs his words to Moshe and not Yehoshua.  "You are soon to lie with your ancestors. This people...