Seemingly everyone in my circle has been reading, and rereading year after year, the excellent book by the late Rabbi Alan Lew, This Is Real, and You Are Totally Unprepared. Not just unprepared for a speech or an exam, not just “appling” (Rabbi Lew’s chosen word for freezing in a moment of decision) over what to make for dinner when you forgot to shop, but unprepared for the pivotal, life-and-death, soul-searching, fate-in-the-balance moment of judgment and redemption that is the “awe-filled days” of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
Read MoreLamenting the Scent
I’m currently attending the Conference on Medicine and Religion at Ohio State University in Columbus. This piece was written during a session entitled, “Attending to Suffering and Acknowledging the Limitations of Medicine through Lament,” presented by Drs. Alex Lion, Ben Snyder, and Mona Raed, Rabbi Bruce Pfeffer, and Chaplain Anastasia Holman, all of Indiana University School of Medicine and Indiana University Health System, Sunday, March 12, 2023.
Scent is transient.
We read a lament from our Muslim cousins where their Prophet, by his example, gave those who followd him permission to grieve, to cry, to express sorrow (Hadith on Grief: Death of the Prophet’s son, Ibrahim).
He came and kissed his departed son, and inhaled his scent.
And we thought of the scents we remembered
Through the neglected sense.
Read MoreUncle!
Between Moshe’s initial failure to win over the Israelites to his leadership and the beginning of the Plagues, the Torah interrupts with – genealogy? And an incomplete one at that, listing only the sons of Reuven and Shim’on, and three generations of Levi. It seems to be setting up the yichus of Aharon and Moshe, because the verse immediately after the genealogic information reads, “The same Aharon and Moshe to whom Hashem said, ‘Take the children of Israel out of Egypt.’”
Buried in the genealogy, however, is foreshadowing of several later stories that occur during the wilderness years, including Korach and Pinchas. But the line that caught my attention concerns a figure whose big moment, according to the Gemara, is coming very soon: Nachshon.
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