Parshat Shelach Our parsha this week speaks of the 12 spies being sent into the Land. Two of them, Yehoshuah and Kalev, give an encouraging report. But the other ten focus on all of the challenges in the Land; the people are like giants, the cities are fortified, the land devours its inhabitants! The people listened to the ten and wailed all night long. “If only we had died in Egypt! If only we had perished in this wilderness!” And they make plans to return to Egypt. Yehoshuah and Kalev attempt to persuade them, but they only threaten to stone them. God becomes angry and decrees that they will wander the wilderness for 40 years. This was indeed a very grievous sin. Some commentators even go
In our Besorah reading this week Yeshua speaks of the birth pangs of Messiah. He warns his talmidim that there will be great troubles in the days before his return. There will be faminines, wars, earthquakes, and religious persecution. Children will turn on their parents and vice versa. There will be false prophets pretending to be the Messiah. He sums it up by saying that it will be the worst trouble since the beginning of the world. Within our tradition this is called Chevlei Mashiach. The Talmud says that it will be a time of impudence, famine, rejection of Torah scholars, rampant immorality, political corruption, and heavy inflation. Tractate Sotah (49b) sums it up this way: In the times
This morning, Rabbi Isaac and I sent the following letter to leaders and pastors of African American churches in the local Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti communities. It is incumbent upon us, as Jews, to speak out against hatred, to speak out against racism, to speak out against discrimination, to speak out against bigotry, to speak out against violence, and to speak out against injustice in all its forms. If not now, when? - Ken It is with heavy hearts that we join with the African American community in mourning the death of George Floyd and the deaths of Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, and countless other unarmed People of Color by police officers and others who abuse their positions of
