Shalshelet
The nearly 305,000 words of a handwritten Torah scroll tell tales, state laws and inspire ideas. It is devoid of some useful things like vowels, punctuation and cantillation marks. Cantillation, or trope, is the musical chanting that can help bring Torah text alive when it’s read aloud, as during services.
It’s Our Story
Last week’s Torah reading was mostly the story of Noah and the Flood. One of the more curious elements of the tale is what happens when the earth dries out enough for the animals and their human tenders to exit the vessel.
Bee Juice
My recent posts...After havdala ended last week’s Galeem (“waves,” our Sunday school), the usual joyful mayhem erupted in the lobby: Kids running down halls for a water bottle, a work of art, a lollipop; parents calling after them “Remember your ________!”; brief...
Welcome to”chol”
A couple days of magnificent weather have been a welcome respite from the bounty of precipitation during Sukkot and the closing festival days. This morning, we stored away our sukkah — unscathed by the nor’easter — for next year.
Countup to Torah
Many of us have been counting the days, sometimes the hours and minutes, from when our social and work lives changed. (It’s been close to 365 days, 8,760 hours, over half-a-million minutes.)
We can feel that in every aspect of our coronavirus lives we have been counting up to an end that sometimes appears to be within reach, then eludes us; three steps forward, one back, two forward, three back…a macabre dance.
Yet we persevere; what else should we do? We mourn lives cut short; we question how responses to danger can be so varied; we celebrate medical advances that preserve life; we yearn for touch, for smiles. We get creative, we get despondent.
And we count. We count the ways we’ll celebrate our liberation from isolation. We count on one another.
No longer strangers to counting, we count on our tradition to help ground us, and so it is that we will count omer. Click here for a handy omer counting assistant.
Shabbat shalom !שבת שלום
Click on the image below for a printable pdf
