Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from June, 2019

Someone she can look up to: Proud, strong, smart, gorgeous religious women we're not afraid to show our daughters

Not long after we moved to Israel, I found Naomi Rivka, who was 8 at the time, playing with her Barbies.  The Barbies were all dressed up, as usual, but there was something new: one the head of one, Naomi Rivka had wound a delicate assemblage of toilet paper and lace, towering high and graceful over the doll's pretty, slender face. Here in Israel, we were suddenly surrounded by beautiful, graceful, slender young married Sephardi women, for whom a tichel, piled as high as possible, is the de rigeur headware -- and that was exactly how Naomi Rivka wanted her Barbie to look. And because 8-year-old girls are reasonably transparent, chances were good that that was how she herself wanted to look someday.  Tall, slim, high cheekbones, okay... those may be genetic factors.  But gloriously crowned in a high, swirling tichel... that's something you learn from your environment.  That's something little girls pick up from looking around and role playing years, and even decades, befor

Very Wild Things: a Shavuos Dvar Torah for 5779 / 2019

Just in time for Shavuos, I want to tell you a very serious, very important story about the Jewish people and yetzias Mitzrayim and our history and Matan Torah. I had a little help with some of the writing. The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another his mother called him “WILD THING!” and Max said “I’LL EAT YOU UP!” so he was sent to bed without eating anything. Now, I guess I should mention that the help with the writing came from the author Maurice Sendak , a giant of a writer in the children’s literature world. But this is not unrelated, because as a Jewish child, growing up in the U.S. in the shadow of the Shoah, there were some very real monsters in Maurice Sendak’s world… and some very Jewish ideas. Like this idea of the WILD THING. In Yiddish, we’d say “vilde chaya.” A wild animal. Max is being wild – but more importantly, he’s being immature, just as Yosef was, we’re told, before he was taken off and sold to Mitzrayim. Okay, Yosef didn’t wear

Shavuos: The Great Equalizer, a short dvar Torah for 5778 / 2018

Oops – posting this a little late! When a person comes to study Judaism, although I certainly hope they’re welcomed and greeted warmly in shuls and classes, the stark truth is – we don’t need you. The message isn’t quite “go away,” but just, “we don’t need you.” I grew up knowing Jews don’t proselytize: we don’t seek converts. In general, we believe that as long as a non-Jew follows the seven laws of Noach’s descendents, they’re doing okay. “We don’t need you.” But the truth is, the world wasn’t in great shape after Noach’s time. Hashem promised he wouldn’t send another flood, but we know the majority of people were ovdei avodah zara. The world was desperate for a message of truth, a messenger of Hashem. And then, along came Avraham and Sara, the spiritual parents of every geir, every convert, ever. They were originally Avram and Sarai, but they shed their old names as they stepped into the greater role that Hashem had prepared for them: bringing Hashem’s truth into the world. We kn