Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/torah_commentary/page/2/)
One of the central passages of the seder involves a presentation of the questions of, and the responses to four paradigmatic sons. The four sons are not four distinct individuals, rather, each one of us is all four of the sons, at different moments of our personal spiritual development.
An iconography of sorrow disrupts and reconfigures our practices of recognition. It is not our gaze in the form of Western media attention that determines who should appear as the subject of care. Rather it is proximity to Christ on the cross that determines who and what we should see.
For centuries we were safe from the bloodletting that we fantasized about, because we were powerless on the whole, and our blood was being let. The fantasy of turning the tables was a fantasy of comfort. Now, however, our oppression has—in most parts of the world—ended. The State of Israel is powerful, armed, mighty, yet we continue to read and celebrate the fantasies of revenge.
So should we stop remembering – and like, our classical Liberal forebears, cease to commemorate Purim and Tishah B’Av? Alternatively – and this is what I would recommend – should we commit ourselves to a fuller and more dimensioned understanding of Jewish history that acknowledges the achievements and astounding creativity of Jewish life alongside the suffering?
These days, there is no shortage of hatred to go around. Tragically, much of this hatred has erupted into tragic violence in Jerusalem this week, a brutal set of murders in a synagogue that most clearly illustrates the religious, and we may say, biblical nature of this conflict.
In the Torah, Joseph was known as a prophet predicting seven years of abundance followed by seven years of famine in Egypt. Today’s Josephs, our modern-day prophets, are climate scientists predicting the fate that awaits us from climate change. While the predictions are clear, why are we not heeding our Josephs’ advice? Our denial stands in the way, but we have the power to change that.
As political battles rage around the world and suffering continues, where does our hope fall? Is hope a realization for the future or something that can be seen in the present? Mark Kirschbaum explains how Messianic hope is a meant as a possibility for a just present.
Shavuot provides an opportunity to peer deeply into the open self, a process embodied in the receiving of Torah at Sinai. The question is: will you choose to go up?
For many saying “I need you” is scary. If I need you, then I am needy, and so I am dependent, and so I am a failure. But the truth is that I do need you, that I cannot make it [with the same success] without you, that I am [therefore] needy and that I am dependent. It just means that I am human – and that I enjoy a relationship with you that makes many things possible. That is a cause for rejoicing!
I once gave a sermon, at the Jewish New Year, during which a thunderstorm broke out and water started to pour through the synagogue roof. I’d like to claim that this was a cleverly-orchestrated special effects stunt that I’d managed to engineer; or even an example of my special relationship with what our tradition, anthropomorphically, calls ‘Our God in Heaven’. (Alas, it was just a leaking roof). The title of the sermon was pinched – or ‘adapted’, as we writers say – from Martin Scorsese’s ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’ which had come out that year (1988). In view of the release of Darren Aronofsky’ s quasi-biblical epic ‘Noah’ with Russell Crowe as the eponymous hero – presumably not timed to coincide with the publication this week of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report which relates what we already know in our guts, that global warming has already left its mark “on all continents and across the oceans”, creating havoc with our global weather including extreme heat waves and floods, as well as endangering food supplies; and that we are on the brink of “abrupt and irreversible changes” – I would like to share with you the text of this story-sermon, which has, sadly, frighteningly, stood the test of time…