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Tag: Rabbi Efrat Zarren-Zohar

Jun 6, 2025

Bestowing Blessings On Each Other

The priestly blessing found in this week’s parashah, Naso, is one that has been an important part of our people’s story for three millennia. In the days when the Temple stood in Jerusalem, the priests offered this blessing on behalf of G-d to the people. This tradition continues today in many congregations, where those who are descendants of the Kohanim, the high priests, ascend the bimah and bless the congregation. This blessing is also recited under the chuppah, when children are welcomed into the covenant and named, and it is the prayer bestowed upon children by their parents at Shabbat and holy days. The three benedictions of this prayer are simple and yet incredibly powerful. The words ring in our ears as we consider the many special moments when we’ve heard them. I recently came across a story that spoke of the extreme importance and power of these words.

May 30, 2025

Everyone Counts: What Parshat Bamidbar & Pride Month Teach Us About Sacred Belonging

As we step into the month of June — Pride Month — the Jewish calendar hands us Parshat Bamidbar, the first Torah portion in the Book of Numbers. And yes, it opens with… a census. It’s the spiritual equivalent of a divine Excel spreadsheet: rows, columns, names, tribes, tallies. Not exactly the kind of Torah portion that screams, “Celebrate queerness!” And yet — Bamidbar may be exactly what we need this month. Because buried within its orderly accounting is a message that’s anything but bureaucratic. Rashi, our ever-astute medieval commentator, tells us that God commanded the census not for logistics, but for love.

May 23, 2025

Education is our Jewish Superpower

This week’s double Torah portion, Behar–Bechukotai, closes out the book of Leviticus with what can only be described as a spiritual mic drop — or maybe more accurately, a Torah-powered origin story. Because what we get here isn’t just a list of laws. It’s a blueprint for building a society powered not by force, but by faith. Not by conquest, but by conscience. And most importantly — by the superpower we’ve relied on for generations: learning. In Parshat Behar, we encounter Shmita — the mitzvah to let the land rest every seven years. No planting. No harvesting. No business as usual. Just stop. Trust. Recharge. It’s the Torah’s version of powering down in order to power up.

May 16, 2025

On the Omer and Orchids

I can’t keep most plants alive, but somehow my orchids thrive. Fragile yet resilient, they bloom when I least expect it. On one of the darkest days of the last year, I returned home shaken by the loss of eight Israeli soldiers in Gaza to find that an orchid I thought was long dead had flowered. During the shiva for my daughter’s closest friend, also killed in Gaza, another bloomed despite having shed its flowers only a month earlier. On the day following the attacks of October 7th, I sat dazed and disoriented in my garden watching a bee gather pollen from a flower.

May 9, 2025

Made with Love

Kedoshim contains the two great love commands of the Torah. The first is, “Love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord” (Lev. 19:18). Rabbi Akiva called this “the great principle of the Torah.” The second is no less challenging: “The stranger living among you must be treated as your native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were strangers in Egypt. I am the Lord your God (Lev. 19:34). These are extraordinary commands. Many civilizations contain variants of the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do to you,” or in the negative form attributed to Hillel (sometimes called the Silver Rule), “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary; go and learn.”(Shabbat 31a). But these are rules of reciprocity, not love.

May 2, 2025

Israel Needs Our Prayers — and Our Engagement

One of the most beautiful pieces of Jewish liturgy is one of the most modern: the Prayer for the State of Israel. But despite its beauty and poignancy, the prayer has become a locus of controversy. In the early 1990s, a tradition of sorts emerged: whenever people disliked what the Israeli government was doing, they stopped reciting the prayer or altered its wording. During the Oslo process, many on the Orthodox right refrained from reciting that prayer entirely or changed its wording. And since Benjamin Netanyahu’s government took office, and especially since the war in Gaza began, many on the left have been calling for similar changes or omissions; replacing words with those they find more palatable or not saying the prayer at all.

Apr 25, 2025

Seeing the Grand Tapestry

Parshat Shemini presents a pivotal moment in the Torah, particularly in the context of community and leadership. The portion details the inauguration of the Mishkan (Tabernacle) and the roles of Aaron and his sons as the first priests. One significant event is the tragic death of Aaron's sons, who bring unauthorized fire before God. This alien fire consumed them, and they instantly died. A day that began amidst celebration, and particular elevation for Aaron and Elisheva’s family of Kohanim (priests), turned into one of death and grief.

Apr 11, 2025

Matzah: Bread of Slavery or Liberty?

Made only of flour and water — with no shortening, yeast, or enriching ingredients — matzah recreates the hard “bread of affliction” (Devarim / Deuteronomy 16:3) and meager food given to the Hebrews in Egypt by their exploitative masters. Like the bitter herbs eaten at the Seder, it represents the degradation and suffering of the Israelites. Matzah is, therefore, both the bread of freedom and the erstwhile bread of slavery. It is not unusual for ex-slaves to invert the very symbols of slavery to express their rejection of the masters’ values. But there is a deeper meaning in the double-edged symbolism of matzah... Matzah is the bread of the Exodus way, the bread of freedom; hametz is the bread eaten in the house of bondage, in Egypt.

Apr 4, 2025

Vayikra: A Great Smallness

An article in New York magazine entitled “How Not to Talk to Your Kids” described Thomas, a gifted fifth grader who attended a highly competitive school. In his school, prospective kindergarteners were given an IQ test to confirm their precociousness, and only the top one percent of all applicants was accepted. Thomas scored in the top one percent of the top one percent. Since Thomas could walk, he has always heard that he was smart. But as he progressed through school, this self-awareness didn’t always translate into fearless confidence in tackling his schoolwork. In fact, Thomas’s father noticed just the opposite...

Mar 28, 2025

What Blessing Can You Offer Someone Today?

One of the things I miss most about going to shul regularly is the moment when the final line of a book of Torah is read. In many places, the kahal (community) rises and calls out, “Chazak, chazak, v’nit’chazek” (“Be strong, be strong, and may we be strengthened”). These words are then echoed by the Torah reader. This 30-second ritual takes an otherwise ordinary moment in the flow of Torah reading and transforms it into a reflection of what we have experienced and what we hope is to come. This week’s Torah portion, Parashat Pekudei, reveals a similar moment of enriching dissonance.

Mar 21, 2025

Can’t We Just Skip to the Good Parts?

If you were making a movie version of the Torah, you wouldn’t have a Parshas Vayakhel. You would have last week’s Golden Calf episode; you might have Moshe “on the mountain” getting instructions for the Mishkan. You certainly would include the splitting of the sea in your movie. You might even have a scene where we hear Hashem say, “build Me a mishkan and I will dwell among them,” from Parshas Trumah and some jump-cut edits to building the various mishkan components. But you certainly would not have Moshe telling all the details of the build to the Jewish people and then the actual item by item description of the build like in Parshas Vayakhel. Instead, you would have a montage.

Mar 14, 2025

Purim 5785

It can’t happen here,” thought the Jews of Susa on the eve of their planned extermination, “not here; this is the country of Cyrus the Great!” They were right to be shocked. Persia’s emperor Cyrus had allowed – and helped – the Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple after the Babylonian Exile... The incredulity of Persian Jews when Haman the Wicked so easily convinced King Assuerus to massacre the Jews is understandable. If the fact itself was shocking, the ease with which Assuerus’ acquiesce to betray his ancient allies was outstanding. He had no animosity towards Jews. He was just a frivolous monarch, interested in hunts and parties, akin to a modern politician who spends his tenure golfing.

Mar 7, 2025

Longing for More

This week is Parashat Tetzaveh, which details the dress of the Kohanim / the priests and the aspects of the altar, on which the priests performed sacrifices. This past week, I also taught an evening adult bat mitzvah class at Beth Torah Benny Rok Campus about Shabbat. What to teach that wouldn’t be... routine, obvious, maybe boring, G!D forbid? So I started by putting onto the classroom table my own challah board, knife, challah cover and some salt. And I figured I would begin the whole lesson with a question that they might not know the answer to in order to capture their attention after a long day: Why the salt? Why do we traditionally dip our bread into a bit of salt or sprinkle salt on the bread on Friday night? Total quiet— I now had their attention, success!

Feb 28, 2025

Building a Sanctuary of Divine Presence

In Parashat Terumah, the Children of Israel embark on a remarkable endeavor. They undertake the creation of a space miniature in size, yet infinite in purpose: the mishkan (tabernacle), a portable temple designed to represent the Divine Presence accompanying them in their journey. This mishkan was a cubic structure within which the Israelites transported the tablets of the Covenant upon their shoulders throughout their desert wanderings toward the Promised Land. Its significance was profound, serving as the material vessel inviting the divine presence to dwell among them…

Feb 21, 2025

The Soul and the Law

After several years of teaching, I became a pulpit rabbi. Since I had really only seen my father in the pulpit, I decided to ask some notable rabbis how they ran their synagogues. I had a series of lunches and learned of the differences in the way a variety of rabbis thought about the institutions they lead. One was broadly inspirational and philosophical. He spoke of the synagogue as a sacred community that thirsted for the principles of Torah...

Feb 14, 2025

You Cannot Do It By Yourself

Yitro, Moses’s father-in-law, (for whom the parsha is named this week) sees Moses judging all of Israel’s matters by himself, thus forcing people to wait from morning until evening. He tells Moses that he will only succeed in causing the nation and himself to become weary. What was so onerous about judging all those cases? Is it not possible that Moses simply had such a brilliant legal mind that he could handle this formidable task? Sforno argues that Moses was biting off way more than any human being could chew…

Feb 7, 2025

What I Learned from Meirav Berger

One of the most striking interpretations of this week's Torah portion Beshalach comes from a Midrash describing the splitting of the Red Sea. In the midst of this miraculous event, the Midrash presents a conversation between two anonymous men called Reuben and Shimon, as they cross the seabed. “In Egypt, we were immersed in mortar, and here we are still surrounded by mortar,” they remarked. “In Egypt, we had the mortar that accompanied the bricks, and here at the Red Sea, we have the mud caused by the splitting waters.” Amidst the miracle, all they could see was mud and dirt; to them, mud was mud, this time, in a new place. Their view was clouded, preventing them from grasping the significance of the moment.

Jan 31, 2025

The Process of Social Upheaval

In normal times, I approach Parashat Bo in the usual way. I dive deep into fine points of the story and the language of the text. I carefully examine Pharaoh’s response to each plague (was he adamant in his refusal, or ambivalent?). This is, after all, how we Jews study text, assuming that every detail of the text, even the smallest turn of phrase, contains profound meaning for us. But these are not normal times. I feel called to zoom out from the fine points of the text and ask: What is the overall message of this portion for me this year? What do the broad strokes of this story teach about a time of massive social upheaval?

Jan 24, 2025

Facing Your Personal Egypt

Have you ever had a CAT scan or MRI? They send you to a room that looks like something out of Star Trek. If you are like me, you shudder to even think about it. There is something about the machinery, the clanking noise, the lights and the freezing room that is just plain scary. Most of all, however, is that table in the middle. You climb up and have to lie on a very narrow space and just wait for the exam to be over. In Hebrew, a narrow space is called Meytzarim, "straits" geographically, but also any place that constricts you physically or personally. It is also embedded in the word Mitzrayim, which is the Hebrew name for the Land of Egypt.

Jan 17, 2025

The “New” Normal

The ancient and so-far uncured disease of “anti-Semitism” is reflected in this week’s Torah portion. Pharaoh tells his people: “Behold, the people of the children of Israel are too many and too mighty for us. Come let us deal wisely with them …lest they join themselves unto our enemies and fight against us…”(Shemot/ Exodus 1:9-10). Pharaoh’s description of the situation is not only wrong but reflects wild paranoia... The crazed statements of Pharaoh led to the enslavement of the Israelites.