I got to see both ends of life last week: I accompanied a mohel for a bris and went to a funeral home the very next day. The experiences both upset me and filled me with joy, but not for the reasons you’d think. Listen to find out how and why!
I was in Miami over Memorial Day weekend with a group of Latino and Jewish kids. Getting them to interact after a whole year of meeting bi-weekly was our job—not easy when everyone wants to feel safe by hanging out with their own tribes. Here I tell the story of how that happened in the end, and the beauty and hope and healing that happened, for them and for me. I also share a lot of my own story, as I told it to them. (You can also go to my website to learn more about me: lnegditamid.us
Moss and taxes. A reciprocal relationship between government and people. Moss is a perfect example of cooperation and reciprocity. Yet we’ve been programmed to think that we as individuals are responsible for our own successes and failures, riches and poverty, separate from the society and system we live in. What the Bible teaches about caring for the Earth and the consequences of not doing so…pretty gruesome. And we are living it now. But let’s learn from moss…
Mass shootings, filibusters, laws that don’t serve the majority, yet we are prevented from changing them. The way we treat our people reflects the way we treat and possess our land. If only this one statement in Torah could be respected: “the land is not yours; it is Mine,” it could change everything. With a special treat—the words of Woody Guthrie that most of us don’t know…
With abortion rights being threatened, and shortages of all kinds of goods, there’s a lot to be alarmed and hopeless about. The parsha this week makes us take a look at ourselves, though, in a different way. Who are the rejects of our society and how different are we from the society reflected in our ancient sacred books? We may be shocked at women being burned and people being stoned, and we may want to reject our heritage. But we can’t walk away from where we come from any more than we can wal...
Is it my personal obsession with toilets, or is it our culture? I saw this crazy video on Facebook, and I couldn’t look away. All the toxic chemicals! This week’s parsha teaches us about how to be holy, like God, and I don’t think it’s by making colorful, foamy designs in empty toilets and flushing them down for the hell of it…
As Jews, we think a lot about our land. On Passover, we talk about returning each year to the land. As Americans, we have a responsibility to the land as well—or, as humans in general. The history of our national parks is a painful one, and our responsibility towards native peoples is real. Do we pass over it, like God did our houses, and say it’s a thing of the past? Akharei Mot has a few answers for us, I think.
It’s such a hard year to talk about liberation. So much pain in the world. Do we get to cancel it?
This week there’s lots of scrubbing—of stones and stoves and refrigerators—the latter because Passover is coming. In the parsha, it’s about scrubbing away disease. Passover is about freedom from slavery, but we have a complicated past of becoming slave owners in the U.S. The history of being both enslaved and oppressed and enslavers and oppressors is an unsavory history, hard to swallow. How do we process this and come out to a place of expansiveness, despite the challenges of the world? Not sur...
Is aging something to be afraid of and push away? Should we change our skin and hair in order to look younger? I thought we were getting beyond that. As we have learned to relate in different ways since isolation set in two years ago at the start of the pandemic, so we can find news ways of believing in and helping ourselves and our bodies heal—as I discovered Wim Hof two weeks ago on the anniversary of the shut-down in New York City. Like in the parsha, hopefully after isolation, we come out he...
Helen Keller’s life was a myth, and so are many stories in the Torah. As Aaron’s sons are killed for thinking for themselves, and Aaron is silent, so was Helen Keller silenced. Now there is an effort to silence Ketanji Brown Jackson.
I’ve been wondering how to go forward with my weekly blogs and podcasts, focusing only on Torah, which is so male-oriented, as a female rabbi coming into my own. Am I continuing the sexism? On Purim, we are commanded to turn everything on its head. Thinking about the 50th anniversary of the first ordained American female rabbi, plus this week’s parsha, made me wonder about my role and how to stretch to the next level. But it’s true of the world as well. It’s being stretched, as we all are. This ...
With all that’s happening in Ukraine, what is our individual and collective responsibility? This week’s parsha is about how to make expiation. How do we??
Can we take one more thing? I mean, we need a war, too, now, on top of the pandemic? How scary is that? As a distraction, and to laugh, I’ve been watching Good Girls. We’re coming into Purim soon, when we’re supposed to laugh, so I guess I’m practicing. P’kudei is a completion of sorts, with nothing to laugh about, and the mystery of clouds and fires, but we do need to laugh, as one Ukrainian mother reminds us.
When my friend told me she had to go for surgery next week and she was scared, I went into overdrive in organizing a circle to support her in healing. And the gifts of offerings started pouring in from those attendance: could I tell them stop, it’s too much, like Moses did to the Israelites?
My daughter went to Mexico and she asked what I wanted her to bring back. Rags, I said. Listen if you’re curious how this could possibly connect to the Golden Calf, the broken tablets, the death of so many Israelites, and the glow Moses gets when he speaks to God. I hope you’re curious. ;)
In this week’s parsha, the priests are given their special clothing and rules about sacrifices. There’s lots of blood from the animal sacrifices and the priests must wear the twelve tribes on their hearts. What do we wear on our hearts? Do we only think about our own tribes? The first episode of Radio Lab inspired this episode of my podcast.
Is the sanctuary a beautiful place for God, or is it for us? Because who needs it, really? Last week I talked about sacred time; this week I talk about sacred space and why it’s so important, especially in today’s world.
In our efforts to control or conquer time, we get so bogged down in the details of doing that hold us back from what really matters, yet sometimes it’s also the details that really matter. The laws of the Torah seem stuck in an ancient time, yet sometimes they are translatable and we still have to learn from them in our time. Here I talk about a nightmare I had about my daughter’s upcoming wedding and how it led to rethinking the timing of it—and other things, especially what really matters.
After walking to freedom, there’s still so much work to be done. Jethro hears the calling and becomes a believer. The Israelites finally do, too, but true change and transformation will be harder. As we just celebrated the life of Dr. King, we continue to struggle to see the human family as and our connection to earth as One. From Black Lives Matter to Critical Race Theory being banned and racist voices gaining power, we can not lose the faith we learn from people like Jethro and MLK in the poss...
This week is when we walk to freedom through the split sea. But it’s not a straight line to freedom, and we may have a change of heart and want to turn around and go back to a time and place we imagine was better. But was it really?
It’s January 6th, a new part of our history to commemorate. Sometimes we need to see the darkness before we can come out of it. Darkness is one of the last plagues, and things will get worse before they get better, but the story of liberation is so central to Judaism, it has given strength to so many people to keep going.
This episode is about the state of our hearts and whether we keep them open or closed and how that impacts the world. How much are we thinking about the vaccine as a cure-all for our global problems while neglecting the environmental crisis? And how can we do it differently?
With the darkest days and times upon us, Moses comes along to give us hope, as he has done for previous generations. So many parallels…
Personal debt in the form of credit cards, student debt, medical debt, enslaves Americans in the same way the starving people during the famine in Torah were enslaved by their debt to Pharaoh. This week in Torah, Joseph reveals his true identity to his brothers, his family is saved from the famine, but not without a compromise. The starving people go into debt in order to eat, as so many are today. Jubilee? Shmita? A release of debt? Many are calling for it now!
Dreams and the way our lives turn out often diverge, something to the point that we are shocked. Miketz is about waking up, losing innocence, and hopefully learning from our experiences. This is true for us as individuals but also for the world as we wake up from this nightmare of a pandemic.
It was Thanksgiving again, and so different from last year’s middle-of-the-pandemic one. Now it was edge-of-the-pandemic, and reintegrating slowly into life with lessons hopefully learned. I was wondering about the circularity of life, a ring I lost and found, Tamar’s story of prostitution and how women have taken care of themselves and each other for eons because the greater society fails to do so. Listen to learn more!
How do our expectations and perceptions change or impact a situation, whether it’s wedding dress shopping with my daughter or Jacob meeting his brother after so many years? Listen to find out.
Women’s agency over their own bodies, Kyle Rittenhouse, racist attacks and trials, the climate summit. They’re all related. And to this week’s Torah reading…Need I explain?
What do Halloween, Jacob and Esau and the Climate Summit in Glasgow have in common? Listen and you’ll find out!
