With the Fall season underway, Rabbi Hayyim Angel returns to a robust schedule of Adult Education classes.
On Tuesday, September 16, from 8:00-9:00 pm Eastern Time, Rabbi Hayyim Angel will teach a Zoom class on Jeremiah chapter 31, the Haftarah for the Second Day of Rosh HaShanah. This class is sponsored by Ben Porat Yosef Yeshiva Day School of Paramus, New Jersey. It is free and open to the public.
This essay by Rabbi Benzion Uziel, and translated by Rabbi Daniel Bouskila, is entitled “You Shall Love Truth and Peace.” It originally appeared in Rabbi Uziel's classic work of Jewish thought Hegyonei Uziel (volume 2, pages 33–34). It is one of his most eloquent statements on unity, and beautifully encapsulates his creative blend of classic rabbinic scholarship with responsible leadership.
Yom Kippur is a gift that God has given to those who follow the Torah. But its message is a gift for all humanity. “A free man, when he fails, blames nobody.” Nobody, that is, except oneself. When one can be honest before God, one is on the road to personal freedom.
The Book of Jonah is a larger-than-life story of every individual who seeks closeness with God. There is a paradoxical recognition that the closer one comes to God, the more one becomes conscious of the chasm separating God’s wisdom from our own.
The opening verses of the book of Samuel are the Haftarah for Rosh Hashanah, the first day of the Jewish year. The story itself is simple: Hannah has difficulty conceiving; she prays to God for a son, and vows to dedicate him to God. The account in the book of Samuel includes the interaction between Hannah and her husband Elkanah, and between Hannah and Eli the priest. Biblical accounts invite us to seek out their moral and spiritual teachings and their life lessons, and how to apply them.
The Akedah, or binding of Isaac (Genesis 22:1–19), [1] is a formative passage in Jewish tradition. It plays a central role on Rosh haShanah, and many communities include this passage in their early morning daily liturgy. What should we learn from this jarring narrative with regard to faith and religious life?
The challenge of this season is for us to listen more carefully to our inner scientist and to ask our inner lawyer to stop making excuses for us. Prayers of confession are not meant to weaken us but to give us confidence that we can change for the better, we can grow spiritually, we can overcome past shortcomings. If we let our inner scientist win, the holy day season will be a success.
On a holiday that brought much of the nation together for a week in one place, the four species let each group take pride in its region while giving the group a sense of cohesiveness. The central place given to the four species as a Jewish symbol in later times suggests that this message may ultimately have been internalized.
Tanakh needed prophecy so that we could transcend ourselves and our limited perspectives to aspire to a more perfected self and world, and to reach out across the infinite gulf to God. Ultimately, however, it also needed Ecclesiastes to teach how to have faith from the human perspective, so that we may grow in our fear of Heaven and observe God’s commandments in truth.
Ezra raised new leaders and engaged the members of the community to take active roles in their spiritual development. He raised many disciples, thereby broadening the base of the leadership and also ensuring continuity rather than dependence on him. Nehemiah tended to occupy center stage. He portrayed himself as an indispensable leader.