Tag: Rabbi Efrat Zarren-Zohar

This recent Thanksgiving I was in Boston visiting my uncle (my father’s only brother), my aunt and their children and grandchildren. My sister and her son also flew in. The night before Thanksgiving dinner, my sister, my husband Avi and I all had dinner together (but without the other family members), and she shared a difficult issue she was wrestling with regarding her husband. Wrestling… it’s what we often do with family, right?

The Torah repeatedly portrays transformative journeys where departure from home signifies not just a physical relocation but a profound spiritual evolution. We saw this with Abraham and Sarah in Parashat Lech Lecha a few weeks ago, and this week we see it in Parashat Vayeitzei with Jacob, their grandchild. In Lech Lecha, G!D commands Abraham: “Go forth from your land, your birthplace, and your father’s house, to the land I will show you.” (Genesis 12:1) Abraham’s departure is a leap of faith. He leaves behind the familiar to establish a covenantal relationship with God. This journey symbolizes the move from comfort to challenge, from the known to the unknown, as Abraham becomes the father of a nation. Jacob’s journey begins under different circumstances. Fleeing from the wrath of Esau, Jacob embarks on a path filled with uncertainty: “And Jacob left Be’er Sheva and went toward Haran.” (Genesis 28:10)

The practice of thanksgiving is meant to awaken us to the blessings we might otherwise take for granted. But for many of us, Thanksgiving this year is overshadowed both by the violence in Israel, Gaza, and Lebanon, and by the strong feelings many of us have about it — feelings often at odds with others around the holiday table. So allow me to offer a different kind of gratitude practice in the hope that it might provide a little solace, and even a little coexistence... spirituality in general is not about denying the presence of suffering, or even evil, in the world.

I really identify with this Torah portion of Chayei Sarah, because parts of it parallel aspects of my own life. After Sarah dies at the outset of this week's parsha and following Abraham’s purchase of the Cave of Machpelah in Hevron to serve as her burial site, we come to the story of Rebecca becoming the wife of Isaac, Abraham’s son.

Idolatry is the practice of treating something of relative importance as though it were of ultimate significance. In our idolatrous age, we often act as though money, careers, sex appeal or prestige are of ultimate importance, when in fact, they are only worthwhile to the degree that they can contribute to our becoming better, more compassionate and more responsible people. Today's Torah reading highlights another source of idolatry. It is altogether common to treat honesty as the highest value possible.

Imagine that you are Abraham, 75 years old, living ~4000 years ago in northern Mesopotamia in the city of Haran, which means “crossroads.” Suddenly, you undergo an epiphany—a moment of Divine revelation that calls to you: “Lech Lecha-Go forth from your country, from your native land, from your father's house to the land that I will show you." In other words - Leave your entire civilization, your culture, your city and almost everyone you know in the world and go to a place you don’t know but will be shown to you. Jaw drop.

Of the many profound lessons that Parashat Noah teaches us about relationships, I’d like to focus on the one we learn from the covenant, the berit, that God makes with Noah in the wake of the flood. A covenant is, fundamentally, a record of the terms of a relationship. Reading the terms of a covenant can teach us about the components and terms of that relationship. This is the first covenant that appears in Tanakh (Jewish Bible) and its function is self-restraint in the name of sustaining and preserving relationship.

I am experiencing such a panoply of emotions as we approach Simchat Torah this year: sadness, despair, and rage, at the memories of last year’s Simchat Torah massacre, but also giddy triumph, hope, and faith. I feel differently than I did a week ago… God pulls the strings behind the curtain, where we cannot see His interventions on our behalf until lo! we are saved.

What is truly remarkable is that Sukkot is called, by tradition zeman simḥateinu / our time of joy. That, to me, is the wonder at the heart of the Jewish experience: that Jews throughout the ages were able to experience risk and uncertainty at every level of their existence and yet they were still able to rejoice. That is spiritual courage of a high order. Faith is not certainty; faith is the courage to live with uncertainty.

May we all embrace the majesty of what praying toהמלך can potentially provide for us as we work toward self-transformation & renewal (בריאה חדשה), reconnect to our own power to do good, and reconnect with our innate value and innate value of all others. We are living through a moment in history where the choices of today will have enormous implications for the future. This is a time for us to be humbled but also find our moral clarity…

The sound of the shofar is primal & ancient. It produces a strange sense of awe and reverence. Think back to that moment before the first blast is sounded; a hushed expectancy fills the synagogue. At the moment we hear the first piercing note, we are struck with an almost childlike wonderment. And for most of us, it is one of our earliest childhood memories. The notes of the shofar are not beautiful by any musical standard, but somehow, we find in their thin piercing blasts something that calls to us.

Here are my feelings on the matter. First, gratitude and joy that we haven’t had a direct and devastating hit so far! Second, sadness and some survivor guilt because some other community(ies) got hit. Third, the realization that hurricanes and other natural disasters are only disasters if human beings live in their path… Think about it. Hurricanes have probably been battering our fair peninsula for thousands of years. But until human beings lived here, no one assigned a “good/bad” label to them.

This week I came across something called the World Happiness Report, which ranks the overall sense of population happiness in 143 countries… Here are their top five countries as ranked by happiness for 2024: 1) Finland 2) Denmark 3) Iceland 4) Sweden and (drumroll please…) 5) Israel! The rest of the top ten are rounded out by 6) Netherlands 7) Norway 8) Luxembourg 9) Australia and 10) Switzerland. Aside from the overwhelming domination of Northern European countries, I was more than a little surprised to see that Israel ranked so highly. Here is what they had to say about Israel…

Years ago, I was invited to speak on a panel about the role of women in religion alongside three other women religious leaders: a protestant pastor, a Muslim scholar and a very involved practitioner of the Bahai faith. I happily agreed to be on the panel, and then I received in my inbox the details of the event including its title: “Women in Religion: Have We Come Far Enough?” And I said aloud to my computer: “No!” To my mind, if we were asking the question, we already had the answer. What could truly be “far enough?”

This week, we entered into the Hebrew month of Elul. In most years, Elul is month of promise and renewal, carrying the energy of hope. This year, our hearts and souls are cracked and grieving. We need to leave space for the sorrow, and know that, as heavy as it feels, and as often as our eyes fill throughout the day, we are not alone in carrying this pain. The world feels so incredibly broken. In so many places. I don't believe we can skip over the grief, force ourselves to put on a good face and paper over the deep sadness. It's there, and there is good reason for its presence, and we need to invite it into the circle, so to speak.

“I ain’t no false prophet - I just know what I know. I go where only the lonely can go,” sings Bob Dylan in his song “False Prophet.” A false prophet makes claims to have secret knowledge that others cannot access. The false prophet uses this information to persuade followers to a particular agenda. Dylan warns against making him into this kind of person: “What are you lookin’ at - there’s nothing to see. Just a cool breeze encircling me.” A false prophet can only exert the authority others give him.

It is a paradox, really. People of real worth tend to have worth, because of their belief in their unworthiness. That's one of Moses's messages to the Israelites in this week's Torah portion, Eikev. Much of the book of Deuteronomy is Moses speaking to the people, giving them a pep talk if you will, attempting to relay the most important messages of the Israelite story so that they can take the wisdom learned with them as they enter the Promised Land.

This week we observed Tisha b’Av, commemorating all the destructions, forced conversions, expulsions, and massacres in our history, culminating in the Shoah. This year, we had yet another disaster to add to this pageant of pain and loss: Hamas’ attack on October 7th. Just as in other times we composed elegies of lament, or kinot, recited every Tisha b’Av, so some have stepped forward with new lamentations.