Dear Friends, I am a child of refugees. With Auschwitz and forced labor behind them, my parents languished for two years in a Displaced Refugee camp in Stuttgart, Germany. Visas were hard to come by. Neither of my parents had a learned skill. Neither had finished high school amidst the disruption of war. Such visas…
Torah: Va’Era – Our Torah finds us in bondage. Moses and Aaron appear before the powerful ruler and warn of impending plaques. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel speaking in Chicago in 1963 at a conference on “Religion and Race,” began: ”At the first conference on religion and race, the main participants were Pharaoh and Moses. Moses’ words were:…
Torah: Shemot – “And a new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph” (Exodus 1:8). This week’s Torah reading begins the Exodus account. The rabbis wonder how the new king could not have known Joseph’s achievements on behalf of Egypt. Mishnat Rabbi Eliezer, composed during the first two centuries of the common era, states that Pharaoh…
Torah: Va’Yigash- What does it take to be a tzaddik, a righteous person? Joseph is distinctly called ha’tzaddik, the righteous one, by the sages of the Talmud (Yoma 35b). They primarily point to Joseph’s overcoming the sexual advances of his employer Potiphar’s wife and emphasize that his self-restraint revealed his exemplary character. Elie Wiesel points…
Huston Smith (2009) Huston Smith, who died at the age of 97 this past Friday in Berkeley, was a towering, spiritual sage. My visits with him endure as gifts of spiritual wisdom and the modeling of genuine goodness. Professor Smith was a trailblazing explorer of religions from the inside, stating, “If we take the world’s enduring…