Moses, Violence, and Injustice
[This is the second of a series of posts on nonviolence in Exodus. The first one, by Aron Wander, is here.] This article is an adaptation of a drash given to the Shtibl community over Zoom on January 9, 2021.…
Category
Torah
Reconceptualizing Resistance
guestpost by Aron Wander Everyday forms of resistance make no headlines. – James Scott, Weapons of the Weak This past August, an exhibit titled “Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust” opened at the Wiener Holocaust Library in London. The Senior Curator,…
Sukkot: The Joy of Abundance Where We Might Feel Scarcity and the Joy of Second Chances
The author, the National Jewish Educator for Avodah, originally wrote this for the Avodah Service Corps. The Festival of Sukkot is about closure. It arrives dramatically as the culmination of not one but two holiday cycles, the Three Pilgrimage Festivals,…
“Today is Pregnant with Eternity”: The Dread and the Possibility of the New Year
The Torah gives just one unique commandment for Rosh HaShanah, to hear the sound of the Shofar, producing that raw, emotionally complex, array of sounds that evoke: the summoning of courage for dangerous battle (such as before Jericho’s walls came…
Crushing the Body & Spirit: Egyptian Slavery & Jewish Labor Law
by Aryeh Bernstein This devar torah for Parashat Ki Tavo and Labor Day was first written internally for the Avodah Service Corps, for which the author is National Jewish Educator. Around the world, Jews are nearing the conclusion of the…
Listening to Color
Erin Graff Zivin is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literature, Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature, and Director of the Graduate Certificate program in Translation Studies at the University of Southern California “The language of color blindness—like the language of…
A Conversation with Alyssa Gray
So back in the old days, a few months ago, before the plague, I started a weekly daf podcast. When I migrated from Soundcloud to the podcast platform Buzzsprout I described the project this way: I know that all the…
The Rav, Reb Chaim of Brisk, & Socialism!
To many Americans, the term “socialism” conjures immediate feelings of suspicion and paranoia. For much of the population, socialism is a threat to the fundamental economic system that the United States is founded upon: capitalism and free enterprise. Yet, from…
Bereshit 20/20: What Torah Teachs Us About Democracy
When T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights embarked on our Torah 20/20 project this past October (with funding from Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah), the goal was to offer Jewish wisdom and language to frame and nourish the…
5 Podcasts on Reproductive Rights that Will Vastly Improve Your Life in 2020
Whether you’re a casual consumer of podcasts or you break into a cold sweat at the thought of not having any at the ready, check out this roundup of podcasts and podcast episodes about abortion and reproductive rights. Each of…