“The facts show that American Jews are mostly safe in this country, New York City included. But recent violent events also show that we cannot take this safety for granted. We can be grateful that anti-Semitism in America today is primarily nonviolent — and all Americans should work hard to make sure that doesn’t change.”
Source: Laura E. Adkins, “Anti-Semitism in the U.S. Isn’t Usually Violent. What If That’s Changing?” (Washington Post)
(Thanks to Joanne Intrator for leading me to this.)
When we ask God to remember the souls of our departed at Yizkor, we request more than a mere mental act. We pray implicitly that by focusing on our loved ones’ souls, God will take action on their behalf and save them from whatever pain they may be suffering, wherever they may be. At the same time, the implication is that this act of remembrance also constitutes a guarantee of Jewish community—well beyond just those we remember, and far beyond us as well. In remembering and in asking for God’s remembrance, we request divine help in continuing our people’s trajectory beyond ourselves, to achieve the ultimate aims of our people’s history. Yizkor is, in the end, not a prayer for the dead, but a promise by the living.
Source: Rabbi Aaron Panken (z”l).
(more…)“You don’t have to pretend that text study isn’t a religious pursuit just to be hip. And you don’t have to be hip to be culturally relevant. I didn’t understand all of the art I saw, but what I understood that night was relevant, and meaningful, an act of bringing Torah into the world.
When you study a Jewish text and create new meaning out of it, you engage in the most central practice in the Jewish religion.”
Source: David A.M. Wilensky, “Getting Drunk on Jewish Texts and Arts at LABA Launch” (J, The Jewish News of Northern California)
“In Vindman, we see one of us: We see a person who graduated from the same schools as we did, the schools of herring on black bread, of Brighton Beach apartments, of Russian television, of hardworking parents. We see a product of similar stories: a Judaism of whispers, often defined by a lone Sholom Aleichem book; the stories of relatives who disappeared; the family members who applied for exit visas, seeking freedom, for which they were thrown out of the Party, for which they were blasted in the Komsomol newspaper as traitors, ‘enemies of the state’.
Yet now, in a cosmic twist of fate, Vindman finds himself in a situation not so different from that of his grandparents: persecuted by the executive branch of the very country his father hoped would offer a life of peace.”
Source: Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt, “The Devastating Irony of the Impeachment Hearings for Russian Jews” (Forward.com)