If you somehow found out that you had one day left to live (God forbid), what would you do? Or rather, what would you do differently? We don’t know when we will die, and we generally act as if there’s always another tomorrow, another opportunity, another day. Judaism recognizes our human nature and tells us to repent one day before death. Since we don’t know when that is, we should repent – perform t’shuvah, every day.
It took a while, but the craftspeople returned the bowl to him. It looked somewhat different than before, but it was beautiful. In repairing the bowl, The artisans created a new art form, named kintsugi. Translated as golden joinery and still popular today, its artisans mend areas of breakage with powdered metals. It does not try to patch them up or blend them so that they aren’t noticeable. From a Philosophical perspective, kintsugi seeks to highlight an object’s imperfections.
Whether it’s driving to Atlanta in the morning or being the unfortunate victim of downtown gridlock just after a UGA game … Oh my gosh, the traffic was so bad … It took me 15 minutes to get across Milledge Ave … We’ve all been there.
But here’s the thing that most of us don’t realize. Even as we complain about traffic, each of us contributes to the traffic … We are the traffic!
1968 was a difficult year. Racial discord and foreign conflicts created an atmosphere of tension and anger. Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy were both assassinated. The United States was embroiled in the war in North Vietnam. The Cold War continued to escalate. There were student protests taking place throughout America, some resulting in violence. The zeitgeist of the country was one of anger, frustration and sadness. People were discontent. In fact, the editors of Time Magazine chose as its Man of the Year, The Dissenter.
The commemoration of Yom HaShoah in Israel is an incredibly powerful thing. At 10:00 AM, sirens go off across the entire country, and everything comes to a standstill. Teachers stop teaching, people stop working. Cars on roads and expressways stop, and drivers get out of their cars.
These sirens blast for a two full minutes. Those two minutes become a country-wide moment of silence, to honor the memory of the six million Jews that were killed during the Holocaust.
Earlier this week during The View, Whoopi Goldberg and her co-hosts talked about this, and Goldberg caused such a stir that she then became the news story. She claimed that the Holocaust was not about race, since both the Nazis and the Jews were white. When pressed, she said that the Holocaust was not about racism, but rather about man’s inhumanity to man. Later that evening, she was a guest on*The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
She said to him: As a black person, I think of race as something I can see.
During the process of creation, a midrash suggests that God consulted with the angels in order to determine whether or not to create human beings.
Fifty seven years ago today, Martin Luther King Jr. stood at the Lincoln Memorial, and delivered a speech that is indelibly woven into our ideals and our hopes.
But unfortunately, it *still* remains a dream.
Tomorrow, we celebrate America’s independence; our freedom. Whereas July 4 is by no means a Jewish holiday, its themes of independence and freedom are central to Judaism.
The first time we are called Israelites is by the enslaving Pharoah. And so, our identity stems from the fact that we were slaves and then we became free.
At almost every prayer service, we celebrate our freedom when we sing Mi Chamocha, which recalls the climactic moment when the Israelites walked safely thorough the middle of the Red Sea.
But just what does it mean to be free?
This week’s Torah portion is a continuation of the first census. At the beginning of the book of Numbers, God says, Take a census of the whole Israelite community by the clans of its ancestral houses, listing the names, every male, head by head.
Several months ago, I was at a meeting of the Athens-Clarke County Census Complete Count Committee, and was asked to share a religious teaching that might connect to the then upcoming American Decennial Census. My mind immediately went to this verse.