|
|
|
Rabbi's Torah
|
|
|
|
Rabbi Marc Kline’s thoughts and views on this week’s Parashah!
Tradition teaches us that in understanding Torah, time and arrangement don’t matter. The purpose of the text is to spawn thoughtful conversation. Rabbis will pull texts from different books and read them as if they were written side by side. Where we can learn from the entirety of the text we apply a concept, “Aen […]
I remember the Charlie Brown Halloween special. I always felt bad for him. House after house, adults gave his friends handfuls of candy. As they compared their haul – after each house, he summed his total up, “I got a rock.” Amidst his despair, he finds Sally, who had spent the previous week with Snoopy […]
Watching more than our share of “made for television serials,” we see how people spend episode after episode visiting new lands, meeting new life-forms, realizing that everyone is a stranger, and learning that our ways are not always the best ways (not what we thought at the beginning of the episode). The good guy at […]
Na-aseh v’nishmah. We will do what we hear. This is the promise the people of Israel made to God at the foot of Sinai. Alerted that they were going to experience awesome teachings, they committed themselves “heart and soul” to observe and obey. On the one hand, we celebrate this steadfast loyalty and honor those […]
“What the world needs now is love, sweet love.” Words from a hit from the ’60s. Everyone agrees that love is the answer. In fact, I don’t think I can name a person that would disagree. However, where we disagree is what love means and what the object and goal of love might be. Most […]
The most heart-wrenching recurring storyline in history involves the controversies that rip families apart. We cry over the many different versions of the Romeo and Juliet love stories wherein families hate each other more than they love their own children. So fixated are these hardened hearts on being right that people’s broken spirits forget to […]
What does it mean to know God? In this week’s portion, God introduces God’s self by “name.” God spoke to Moses, saying, “I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob with the name El Shaddai (Almighty God), but with My name YHWH, I did not become known to them.” (Exodus 6) We look to […]
The voices who encouraged the violence on the 6th must bear responsibility for this attempted coup. One cannot continue to ramp up the rhetoric and the hate and then walk away and claim it was not his/hers/their fault. Perpetuating lies and calling for violence comes with a cost. This is the story we also begin […]
In 31 years of serving as Rabbi and Chaplain, I have served at many hundreds of funerals/memorials. At each, I have always tried helping family and friends moving through their immediate grief and loss. I love knowing that even as people leave our hands, they never leave our hearts. I love that our tradition forces […]
Show of hands – how many of you are afraid? It’s okay; no one is watching to see if you did or didn’t, but I think deep down inside, we are all afraid. While our fears certainly root in our insecurity on so many levels, many of us know we are afraid but don’t know […]