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A New Life During 2 Minutes of Silence

The commemoration of Yom HaShoah in Israel is an incredibly powerful thing. At 10:00 AM, sirens go off across the entire country, and everything comes to a standstill. Teachers stop teaching, people stop working. Cars on roads and expressways stop, and drivers get out of their cars.

These sirens blast for a two full minutes. Those two minutes become a country-wide moment of silence, to honor the memory of the six million Jews that were killed during the Holocaust.

What Whoopi Goldberg can Teach an Athens, GA Elementary School

Earlier this week during The View, Whoopi Goldberg and her co-hosts talked about this, and Goldberg caused such a stir that she then became the news story. She claimed that the Holocaust was not about race, since both the Nazis and the Jews were white. When pressed, she said that the Holocaust was not about racism, but rather about man’s inhumanity to man. Later that evening, she was a guest on*The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

She said to him: As a black person, I think of race as something I can see.

Count Each Person. Each Person Counts.

This week’s Torah portion is a continuation of the first census. At the beginning of the book of Numbers, God says, Take a census of the whole Israelite community by the clans of its ancestral houses, listing the names, every male, head by head.

Several months ago, I was at a meeting of the Athens-Clarke County Census Complete Count Committee, and was asked to share a religious teaching that might connect to the then upcoming American Decennial Census. My mind immediately went to this verse.

After Death Comes Life

There are some people that know the Torah memorized. These individuals know where each verse begins and ends, and are aware of each and every trope. But even these individuals read the Torah portion every week, even though they know it completely; chapter and verse so to speak …

Yom HaShoah 2020

Earlier this morning, I was a guest on a radio show earlier this morning with a colleague and we talked about exactly this, faith during these times. I’ll hopefully have a link to share with the congregation in the next few days, but one thing I want to share from our conversation is that that both of us noted that attendance, albeit over the internet, is up. We are all craving spiritual and social connection with one another.

What day is Today?

What day is today?

I feel like that question has been asked more and more in these recent weeks. With kids staying home from school, and many adults working from home, it’s possible that there hasn’t been much to differentiate one day from another.

But Judaism teaches that our days are not the same. And tonight, I want to share two lessons from our Jewish calendar that reinforce this inspirational idea. It also so happens that both of them occur tonight and in the days ahead.

Hear One Another’s Prayers

This passage from the early part of Exodus suggests that God does indeed hear prayer. And God does not only listen. God reacts. God mentors a young shepherd named Moses. God performs 10 acts of miracle and might in the land of Egypt, culminating in the splitting of the mighty waters of the Red Sea. God frees the Israelites.

But, God frees the Israelites only after God has heard their prayer.