| December 2009
Sinai Update – Week of December 20-26, 2009
Parashat Vayigash (Genesis 44:18 – 47:27) Reflections on the Torah Portion – Sandi Intraub, Family Educator at Temple Sinai
Sandi Intraub is Temple Sinai’s Family Educator, and is a fifth-year rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion in New York. If you haven’t yet met her, she can be found at Temple Sinai most Sunday mornings, leading students and parents in Jewish learning classes and discussions.
In the Broadway Show, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, the narrator sings, “the first recorded rationing in history was a hit.” During the stories of Joseph and his family that stretch over a couple of weeks and include this week’s parshah, Joseph successfully interprets Pharoah’s dreams of seven years of plenty followed by seven years of drought. Joseph becomes second in command and, in the first seven years, stores enough food to then distribute it and feed all of Egypt, including his own family, during the famine.
Thousands of years later, during this holiday season, how successful are we at helping others in need of food, during famines around the world and poverty in our own community? During my recent trip to Senegal with American Jewish World Service (AJWS), I met people who suffer from malnutrition; they are only some of the billions of people who die each year from hunger. In our own city of Boston, we know that people of all faiths, including Jews, experience hunger. As we enjoy delicious meals during this holiday season, let us follow Joseph’s lead and provide food for others. Here are some ways you can help:
- Volunteer with Temple Sinai and Project Ezra on Christmas Day. Contact: Roberta Myerov
- Bring raisins and graham crackers to Temple Sinai for Family Table, Greater Boston’s kosher food pantry, which currently provides nutritious food for 550 individuals in the Boston area.
- Learn about and support American Jewish World Service’s campaign for sustainable change: Fighting Hunger from the Ground Up, http://ajws.org/hunger/ Have a very Happy New Year!
- Sandi Intraub, Family Educator
Sinai Update – Week of December 13-19, 2009
Chanukah has many facets to it, and recent news articles this week have highlighted its many meanings. Often it is our own lens, the one through which we choose to see the world, that determines our interpretation of this rich holiday. Whether addressing the right to religious freedom, steadfast resistance to assimilation, or the questions of internal Jewish strife and authority, a sample of news articles this week emphasize the many angles from which we may approach Chanukah. I hope you enjoy these articles that I’d recommend this week, as we prepare to light the sixth, seventh and eighth candles of Chanukah.
Sinai Update – Week of December 6-12, 2009
Chanukah begins this Friday evening, December 11, a festival of light and joy. Rabbi Arthur Waskow draws our attention to a remarkable image in this Shabbat’s special Haftarah passage for Chanukah, from the prophet Zechariah: an olive tree whose branches feed directly to a menorah. “The two tops of the olive trees feed their gold through two golden tubes” (Zech. 4:12). Zechariah’s prophetic vision includes a Menorah of lights whose energy source is provided directly by an organic, living tree. Rabbi Waskow calls this a “Green Menorah” – ecologically sound, energy-efficient, and using renewable energy.
Throughout history, each generation has viewed Chanukah with its own “lens” and interpretation. At this time the history of our planet, we add a new understanding of Chanukah to the old one’s we have inherited (the fight against assimilation, the miracle of the oil, etc.), namely, that our Festival of Light includes the obligation to create renewable and environmentally safe ways of generating energy, so that our planet and its species, like the Maccabee’s tiny cruse of oil, will last well beyond the crisis we currently face. Perhaps, as leaders of the world’s nations meet this week in Copenhagen for the largest climate change conference ever, they will hear Zechariah’s Chanukah message for us: that spiritual wholeness necessitates care for our physical world. May Menorah stand as our symbol for life, not only of the Jewish people and its survival, but of the entire planet.
My family and I wish you and your dear ones have a very Happy Chanukah!
Sinai Update – Week of November 29 - December 5, 2009
What does it mean to be “Israel”? This week’s Torah portion, where the name “Israel” is first introduced, helps us understand what it means to be Jewish. Commonly, we translate the word “Israel” by the story in which the name appears: Jacob, left alone to confront his mortality and his life in conflict with his brother, Esau, is met by an angel of God, who wrestles with him all night long, and, when the angel cannot defeat Jacob in this wrestling-match, it names him “Yisrael,” Israel, for (as the angel explains, according to the Torah) “you have striven with people and with God and you have prevailed.” Israel, it is implied, means “God-wrestler.” As Jews (as we are frequently taught), we wrestle with God our whole lives to understand better who we are in relation to God, the Source of Life.
But other translations are possible. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808-1888, Germany) wrote that “Israel” stems from the root s-r-r, “to be superior,” and does not refer to Jacob, but rather to God; it literally means “God towers above all.” While “Jacob” comes from the root “heel” and means “one who is trodden by the heels of all others,” his new name “Israel” points to his sudden realization that God’s existence surpasses any event and every person, that God is present with him at all times and can help him overcome all challenges. In other words, the Yisrael name is akin to the Muslim declaration, “Allahu Akhbar,” God is Great.
Jews in every generation are called, too, by this name. It is a reminder of the spiritual insight that we the Jewish people can aspire to in every generation – that everything is connected through God, and that all is One. Yisrael! |
