Teachings: Divrei torah by portion

Ki Tavo- My Mothers and Father Were Wandering Arameans

People are always asking me about my background. “Where did you grow up? What were your parents like? Were they religious?” It seems to be part of a getting-to-know-you ritual. This sense that roots matters seems to be programmed into us, like a spiritually genetic piece of DNA. Judaism understands this well: in fact it commands us to remember our origins—in our daily prayers, in our Shabbat and holiday prayers, and through our rituals.

Simchat Torah is the one of the happiest days in the Jewish calendar, but for me it has an undercurrent of sadness, because my beloved father passed away three days after, in 1990. The weeks before his passing were also painful, and my body remembers this year after year, as I spend one day weeping for no conscious reason, usually between Rosh HaShannah and Yom Kippur.

The year after my Bat Mitzvah at age 36, I longed to study as much about Judaism as I could. In those days, there were no "Introduction to Judaism" classes in almost every synagogue, as there are now. The only class that met my needs was one offered to prospective converts— "The Conversion Class," it was called. In that class, no question was too simple, or too naïve. All questions were welcomed. I felt at home.

"And G*d spoke to Moses, and said to him: "I am Adonai (YHVH), and I appeared to Abraham to Isaac, and to Jacob, as El Shadai, G*d Almighty, but by My name Adonai I made Me not known to them." Exodus, Shemot 6:2.

Have you ever wondered what the Torah means when it says, And G*d spoke..?" As in the quote above, the second Torah portion in the book of Exodus, Va-ayra, begins this way.

Receiving a sacred message

Last week my husband and I went to spend a day with a psychologist who has made a career of helping men and women have more loving and lasting relationships. The room was filled with hundreds of people—some single, some young marrieds, some who had been married for twenty or thirty years. All had come because they found it hard, if not impossible, to sustain the intense feelings of romance that had pulled them together in the first place.

by Barbara Diamond Goldin
 

I was born at 5:16 PM on the day of Erev Yom Kippur, October 4, 1946.

The 13th century Biblical commentator, Hizkuni, explains that Avram (he was not yet called Abraham) had already left his homeland Ur of the Kasdim and was living in Haran. Therefore he was told to leave his land- Haran, and not to go back to his birthplace, Ur, AND to leave his father’s house, and to go where G-d would guide him.

Quite a journey! Leave where you are, don’t go back to where you were, and separate yourself from your parents’ home. Go- and G-d will show you the way.

This article first appeared in the IRAC newsletter

"Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of the Kushite woman whom he had married: for he had married a Kushite woman." --Numbers 12:1

It was 1978, and I was tormented by an internal dilemma. Both daughters had chosen on their own to prepare for Bat Mitzvah, and I, I did not know why. Nothing in my Jewish upbringing had given me an answer to the fundamental question—why be Jewish. No experience in synagogue had given me a clue as to why the rituals and rites of reading Torah compelled Jews to pass this on, generation to generation, for over three thousand years.