At one of the most famous theophanies in the Torah, when Moses stood at the burning bush, God told him to remove his shoes, because he was standing on holy ground.
When is a restaurant, not (only) a restaurant? When it becomes one of the holiest places in New York.
Adapted from her 5784 Rosh Hashanah Sermon of the same name.
In the Summer of 2021, I broke. As a new mom, an acting nurse for my baby with medical issues, and a novice rabbi, I had to prove my worth at every moment. After months of going and going, I arrived in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, for a much-needed vacation.
The Sages distinguish between two Passover celebrations — the first one, called Pesach Mitzrayim, the Passover of Egypt, and every other Passover celebration after that one, known as Pesach Dorot, the Passover of subsequent generations.
As the wine steward said to Pharaoh in Genesis 41:9, “I declare my sins now.” The sin I declare now is my tone-deafness to the significance of this week’s solar eclipse. I just didn’t understand why it was such a big deal to so many people, including to many of the Rabbinic Fellows in Clal’s LEAP program, run in partnership with the University of Pennsylvania’s Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies.
Our family isn’t great about planning things in advance. There have been years when, say, Pesach would be coming in about a week, and we realized we hadn’t ordered all the food we’d need for the seders, leading to a few rather frantic trips to the kosher supermarket.
So while we had been hearing about the upcoming eclipse, we had sort of figured that a 90% partial eclipse (the path along which we live) would be a decent enough experience, and didn’t spend a whole lot of time mapping out a plan – we’d go outside, say, “Cool!” a few times like we did for the 2017 eclipse, and then go back inside.
