[December 7, 2022] “Climate grief and anxiety are now diagnosable mental health crises that impact young people across the Jewish world. For many, what keeps them up at night is not Jewish survival, but human survival…
“Joining together with our People, and remembering a place and time before we had our own land, we are being called to maintain the sanctity of humanity and creation.” The…
“We are growing closer to our last chance to turn our attention back to the earth and its needs, for our beliefs to become re-rooted in reality.” What is sacred…
“What is being born when something is ending and what is ending when something is being born?” This week is the last week of the 7 year sabbatical cycle called…
“The shmita year is nearly ended, but not quite. There is still time. Time to pause. Time to pray.” “And in the night My father came to me And held…
“You can only give what is yours.” Parshat Ki Tavo opens with the commandment of bikkurim. It continues with related agricultural commandments and a commandment to inscribe the Torah on…
“Shmita too can loosen the sway of addictive patterns of consumption.” Parshat Ki Tetze begins with two mitzvot that the rabbis characterize as countering addiction. The first, of these, the…
Friends, We find ourselves in the month of Elul, a time for introspection and checking in with ourselves, a time to confront all the ways in which we missed the…
“For is the tree of the field like a human?” Shmita is riven with tension. On the one hand, it is introduced to us in Parashat Behar as a Shabbat…
“In releasing the land, our finances, and our fellows to freedom, we free ourselves as well, and this freedom ripples out in expansiveness and life.” The new month of Elul…
“In dealing with the land – working it, taking care of it, making it bloom – we have to be constantly connected to the Divine.” The Torah portion of Ekev,…
“If you know you have harmed the earth, know that you can heal it.” On Shabbat Naḥamu, the Sabbath of Comfort the week after Tish’ah B’Av, we read Parashat Va-Etḥanan….
On the confluence of the beginning of Deuteronomy, Tisha b’Av, and the shmita year North Americans often suffer from the affliction of being uprooted from space and time. Out of…
“Through the lens of regret, we learn the importance of appreciating the land and its fundamental purpose of sustaining humankind.” In a surprising twist, the midrash recounts the regret expressed …
“If we lived our love for land – whether in Israel or elsewhere in the world – how different would our world look?” Parshat Pinchas is, at its core, about…
“Where is the sweet spot between conserving and respecting the past (cycles), and progressing towards a new reality (linearly)?” Parashat Balak is one of the two weekly portions in the…
