Just a moment...

You wear your troubles on the outside: the whole world moves seamlessly in one direction and you in another. And even still, you trust that you won’t be marginalized, mocked, misunderstood. In this place, you will be held, even at the ragged edge of life.

What an amazing heritage that recounts the tale of a tzaddik, one of the righteous, who thinks that rocking a baby to sleep is more important than leading services!

Difficult though Jewish faith is, it has had the effect through history of leading us to say: If bad things have happened, let us blame no one but ourselves, and let us labour to make them better. It was this that led Jews, time and again, to emerge from tragedy, shaken, scarred, limping like Jacob after his encounter with the angel, yet resolved t

Abraham gave Jews the courage to challenge the idols of the age. Isaac gave them the capacity for self-sacrifice. Moses taught them to be passionate fighters for justice. But Jacob gave them the knowledge that precisely when you feel most alone, God is still with you, giving you the courage to hope and the strength to dream.

the point of it all – the sacrifices, the purity laws, the holiness codes, all of it – is to come close to God. We are being trained, throughout Leviticus, to see the ultimate Oneness that underlies the dizzyingly manifold nature of our existence.