Archive: September 2022

Why Create a Community of Accidental Killers?

by Adam Cohen
Posted on September 1, 2022

https://openclipart.org/detail/284463/group-therapy Someone with a drug addiction has two main options when it comes to rehab, and both are completely different extremes. They could choose normality. I want to keep things as normal as possible, live my every-day life, have my family and friends there to support me and go to a rehab in my local community. …

Bring Your B-Game

by Eliezer Weinbach
Posted on July 7, 2022

Your community is running a fundraiser but you’ve never made fundraising calls before. Your synagogue needs a minyan but you are often late. A sick person down the block needs a visitor but you don’t know what to say. What if you mess up?…

pretty and cute cottage with a white picket fence in the mid-fall as golden leaves are falling on the trees behind the house and on the lawn in front of the house

Our House Is a Very, Very Fine House

by Rabbi Dov Linzer
Posted on November 11, 2021

Yaakov is the first person in the Torah who articulates the idea of a house of God. “This is nothing other,” he says upon waking up, “than the house of God and this is the gate to heaven” (Gen. 28:17). The Rabbis point out the power of that concept of a house of God and its association with Yaakov.…

Shavuot: A Holiday of Communal Justice

by Rabbi Dov Linzer
Posted on August 6, 2009

The holiday of Shavuot is generally assumed to commemorate the giving of the Torah, which occurred on the 6th of Sivan. In the Torah, however, Shavuot is only described as an agricultural holiday and occurs not on any particular calendrical date, but at the culmination of seven weeks from the beginning of the harvest season that occurs on the second day of Pesach.…

People Cannot be Aggregated

by Rabbi Dov Linzer
Posted on March 12, 2009

Parshat Ki Tisa opens with a census and the requirement to give money rather than to be counted directly. What – other than superstition – is the point of this? I believe that the Torah is telling us a critical message about the worth of each person. …

Slander and its Consequences

by Rabbi Dov Linzer
Posted on April 10, 1998

The parsha of Metzora details laws of impurity, a state that would prevent a person from entering the Temple and, in some cases, from entering the Israelite camp. Tzara’at, often mistranslated as “leprosy,” was a supernatural spotting that could appear on a person’s house, clothes, or body.…