2017

In my garage, I have a box of tools. I even know how to use one or two of them.

Pinchas’s passion, however, is quite problemetic, and God’s adulation is even more so. Pinchas took it upon himself to kill a fellow Israelite and his Mideonite partner, essentially murdering them for being in an interfaith relationship.

18 months ago, I was excited to stand on this bima and talk about the Western Wall agreement that would give men and women the chance to pray at the Western Wall together, free from the shackles of ultra-Orthodox governance that has dominated much of Israeli religious policy. Although it was not a perfect agreement, it was a wonderful symbolic step toward acceptance, pluralism, and tolerance. It was a move toward Shalom Bayit, peace in the home, as Jews would acknowledge the legitimacy of other Jews, regardless of gender or halachic observance.

In this week’s Torah portion, a king named Balak hires the prophet Balaam to curse the Israelite people. But upon seeing the Israelites living peacefully, opening their homes and their hearts, building community, his curse turns into a blessing …

There’s a fantastic scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in which Dr. Jones is explaining to his class the basics about archeology. Archeology, he says, is the search for fact. It is not the search for truth.

The reverse is true about our Torah: It is not a book of fact, but a book of truth. Whether or not God  it is a fact that God split a sea in two so that Israelites could cross the Red Sea, it is true that the Exodus narrative is essential to our identity.

I’ve talked before about the concept of *imitatio Dei.* It’s a religious concept in which we find virtue and blessing by imitating God. God creates Adam and Eve, we imitate God by creating life. God heals Abraham by sending three angelic messengers, we are taught to visit the sick. God loves, we love … And in this section of Leviticus we see that we can imitate God’s holiness as well. We have the opportunity to be God-like in our actions.