Rabbi Bonnie Koppell
Have you found this to be true? Ironically it is sometimes easier to pray when life is difficult than to remember God when life is good. In this week’s Torah portion, Ekev, Moses prepares the Israelites for a future they have never known. They have spent forty years in the…
Shema and V’ahavta. You know these prayers, right? It might have been one of the very first prayers you ever learned. Parents whisper it to their children at night, and it might be the last words said when life draws to a close. Yet how much attention…
149. “I felt like a fraud. So I learned to fly an airplane. So I crossed the Atlantic in a rowboat. So I took a space shot to the moon. On the trip home I thought, “A fraud has circled the moon.” So I took a full page ad in…
Korach- Can we Agree to Disagree? At first glance, Korach sounds surprisingly modern. Standing before Moses and Aaron, Korach accuses them: “All the community are holy, all of them, and the Holy One is in their midst. Why then do you raise yourselves above God’s people? (Numbers 16:3). It is…
The Israelites stand poised to enter the promised land. Moses appoints representatives from each tribe to scout the land and assess the situation. Forty days later the spies return with a discouraging report. Ten of the twelve describe fortified towns inhabited by powerful giants. Their famous conclusion is…
136. “. . . (had nothing to do with) the invisible power that taught him how to breathe from within and control his heartbeats, and that had permitted him to understand why men are afraid of death.”- Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, p. 35 This quote is a flashing…
126. “Justice, justice shall you pursue.” (Deuteronomy 16:20) Of all the values in Judaism- kindness, generosity, compassion. Justice is preeminent. Without a foundation of justice, society cannot endure. I love the way Ahad HaAm expresses it- so powerful- “it was their all. . . .(it) is beauty, goodness, wisdom, truth.” …
With this week’s double Torah portion, B’Har and B’Chukotai, we come to the end of the Book of Leviticus. It is a dramatic conclusion. The Torah lays out a series of blessings promised to the Israelites if they follow God’s guidance—and a much longer, far more frightening list of curses…
116. “But a man’s own safety is a god that sometimes makes very grim demands.”- George Eliot, Romola, p. 512 George Eliot is right. Many things about which we think- “I could/would never do that,” suddenly become feasible when we feel threatened. Or, when there is a threat to someone…
Our Mussar class recently studied the very challenging, well, challenging to me, at least, middah of Emunah- faith. Thank goodness our tradition focuses much more on action than on belief. We have broad latitude about how we see God, how we connect with God, how we question God. The emphasis…