Skip to main content

Ki Tetze 5767

"When a man marries a woman,,," - So much to say about this statement, which appears in two consecutive passages in this week's portion, in VERY different contexts. So much to say about the source of the mitzvah of marriage, but no time to say it, because it's only an hour until Shabbat and this Shabbat is, bli ayin hara, our oldest son's ufruf!!! This next week he is indeed "ki tetze", when he joins his kallah in their new home in Elazar after their wedding this next Yom Revi'i (Wednesday), G-d willing! May we all be blessed to built batim ne'emanim b'yisrael, to the thousandth generation!!!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The One (People) Who Must Not Be Named

Just as Balak brings Bil’am to consider his enemy from various vantage point, likewise does Parashat Balak allow us to view ourselves from the vantage point of others. The main story in Balak is of a single piece, and Am Yisrael appear only as foils for the central story – the interaction of Bil’am with Hashem. What is curious is that not only does Am Yisrael not appear as a real character in the story, we don’t even get a mention. Every time Balak or Bil’am refer to Am Yisrael in the non-visionary passages, they employ indirection: “this people”, “my enemies”, but never Yisrael. It almost feels that they are avoiding speaking the name, one which Bil’am, at least, employs so beautifully in his prophetic speeches. Now, recalling that this story of the interaction of other nations with Am Yisrael is being told in the Torah, I think the message is this: Yisrael is our name in the context of our covenantal interactions with Hashem, just as Hashem’s real name is used only in the conte...
1 comment
Read more

My G-d, a Navaho?

--> Shabbat Shirah, it’s time to sing. Standing on the edge of a Red Sea that has returned to its roiling nature, drowning the fleeing, terrified Egyptian charioteers, Am Yisrael is ecstatic and, with Moshe, breaks into song. They sang in unison a song that welled up from a prophetic vision of redemption that, our sages tell us, outstripped even the visions of Yechezk’el and Isaiah, both of whom “saw” Hashem enthroned on high. The song so permeated the very fabric of being that it is introduced with the imperfect mood of the verb – Az Yashir Moshe… “Then Moshe will sing”, as though the song is every ringing in the background of our Jewishness. So what did they sing? Pure poetry, and therefore, as difficult to feel confident in parsing as it must be even to attempt to imagine what they were feeling at that moment. And yet, we reprise it every day in our morning prayers, as part of Pesukei D’Zimra. Every verse of this song is fit for deep reflection; I’ve chosen...
1 comment
Read more

The Mishkan as an Instance of Tzaddik

I was speaking last night with Yonatan Neril, a student at the yeshiva with a keen interest in exploring the nexus between Torah and environmental consciousness. We were discussing a seminar he will be giving, G-d willing, in the Bat Area in the next few months. He wanted to present Ya'akov Avinu as a model of environmental consciousness, focusing on two episodes of his life as depicted by the Midrash. The first is the famous image of Ya'acov at the Yabok, preparing for the encounter with Esav and, having crossed his family safely over the river, goes back for pachim ketanim , little flasks, seeming worthless given the danger hovering over Ya'acov, yet, as we are told, the righteous prize their few possessions, since they attest to the fact that they have studiously avoided theft. Variants of that Midrash tell us that the contents of those small vials was olive oil from the branch presented by the dove to Noach and preserved during all the intervening generations. The o...
Post a Comment
Read more