 | The fortuity that Thanksgiving often aligns with the Torah dream story of Jacob's Ladder isn't just a calendrical quirk. The Pilgrims of America's colonial experience understood themselves to be following, quite literally, in Jacob's footsteps as travelers on a God-blessed journey toward new spirituality and new opportunity in a new world. From their common narrative, there's much we moderns can learn about what Thanksgiving truly aspires to be – and how we are called to be and become in our own secular and spiritual lives. |
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By Rabbi David Evan Markus
Matot-Masei 5783 (2023) We've heard it over and over, like the opening of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." Depending on where we look around us, we see either beauty or devastation, despair or hope. Now is exactly the time that Torah, and our spiritual calendar, call us to begin seeing it all so that we can begin healing it. We need to see where we've been to know where we're going. By Rabbi David Evan Markus
Pinchas 5783 (2023) For my first weekly dvar Torah as rabbi and spiritual leader of Congregation Shir Ami, let's talk about spearing people through the guts while they have sex on the altar. Seriously? That's the context of how Parshat Pinchas begins. (Isn't it every rabbi's dream to begin serving a spiritual community with this?) Then again, often Torah embeds beautiful worlds of wonder, depth and redemptive meaning precisely in her dark alleys. Here, too – and exactly on time for Judaism's spiritual calendar. |
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