At Avodah, we are committed to providing the resources that allow Jewish leaders to stay in the sacred work of seeking justice for all.
At Avodah, we are committed to providing the resources that allow Jewish leaders to stay in the sacred work of seeking justice for all.
Rabbi Lauren Tuchman shares a teaching on Purim and how Esther and Vashti represent two important paradigms of impactful leadership.
Use these guiding questions and tools to examine your relationship to the land you inhabit and learn how you can take action to support tribal communities.
Rabbi Aryeh Bernstein examines Judaism’s legal structures to ward off wealth disparity through his commentary on the weekly Torah portion.
The main theme of this week’s parasha is the entitlement and arrogance of rich people. The main thesis is that that entitlement and that arrogance, the main features of wealth, undermine religious life and social responsibility. While this theme and this thesis are...
In our parasha, Moshe, in his final charge to the Israelites, completes the recapping of their story which occupied last week’s parasha and moves into his review of the mitzvot (commandments) and multiple exhortations not to abandon them upon entering the land....
This week we begin the book of Devarim, Moshe’s great, booklong speech to prepare the people for liberated, responsible, landed civic life after his imminent death. At the beginning, he recalls desert history (Devarim/Deuteronomy 1:6-13): “YHWH our God spoke to us at...
How do we know whether we are doing the right thing? Should we care what other people think of us as long as we’re doing what we understand to be moral and just? This week we read two Torah portions, Mattot and Mas‘ei, to close out the book of Numbers/Bemidbar. One...
Our parasha shows the Israelites pivoting toward preparations, finally, for proceeding to the Holy Land to inaugurate civic life. In the context of a census taken after two brutal acts of Divine carnage for national insurrections, the Torah matter-of-factly claims...
A few months ago, for Parashat VaYehi, we addressed the violent, vigilante justice carried out at the end of this week’s parasha by Pinhas the priest, a short narrative I described then as “the Torah’s signature episode of political violence”. I also demonstrated how...
In the most obscure verse in this week’s parasha, Chukat, perhaps the most obscure in the whole Torah, Scripture catalogs Israel’s journeys in the desert and describes the geography of one of their pit-stops: “…they set out and encamped beyond Arnon, that is, in the...
This week we read of the revolt of Korah, a Levite nobleman and cousin of Moshe and Aharon’s, against the exclusive Aharonide lineage for the priesthood. Much as demagogues often exploit popular unrest for their personal gain, the charismatic Korah hitches his...
This week’s parashah focuses on the second of the Israelites’ two most devastating moments of collective failure in the desert — the mass breakdown after the scouts overstepped their jurisdiction for reconnaissance by insisting that the land was uninhabitable for the...
The book of Bemidbar/Numbers can be fairly neatly broken into two radically different sections. The first 9 ⅔ chapters depict perfect order: a census, camp architecture, clear delineation of roles for different groups — the perfectly ordered community ready to...
This week’s parasha teaches the laws of the Nazirite, a person who takes a vow of selective abstinence, separating from death and from certain pleasures of the flesh — wine and liquor and other grape products and haircuts — in order to achieve a more...
By Rabbi Lauren Tuchman This week, we begin the fourth book of the Torah, Sefer Bamidbar. In Hebrew, bamidbar means wilderness or desert. In English, the title Numbers derives from the multiple censuses taken throughout the book. Bamidbar is a much more apt title for...
A few years ago, in the midst of a heightened national discourse around reparations for descendants of enslaved people in America and other exploited parties, and standing on the shoulders of moral thinkers and organizers many steps ahead of me, I published an article...
Yesterday’s full conviction of Officer Derek Chauvin represents a collective exhale. A breath we have been holding as a nation for three weeks (and for many far longer) and a reminder of the breath George Floyd was denied as he cried out, “I can’t...
By Rabbi Lauren Tuchman This week’s parsha, Tazria-Metsora is both incredibly timely and deeply complex. Now that the Kohenim have been ordained, their functions are beginning to be outlined. The Book of Leviticus is arguably the Torah’s most complex and...
The last two shabbatot were filled with so much excitement, through our annual Pesach excursion into the exodus story, that we may forget that when last we left our regular, weekly journey through the Torah, we left on one of the Torah’s most dramatic, if...
This Shabbat is also the 7th day of Pesach, which, in addition to being the end of the Biblically-mandated, seven-day, “Festival of Matzot”, is also the date, according to Rabbinic tradition, of the Israelites’ crossing of the Sea of Reeds, drowning of the Egyptian...
I write this note sitting at my dining room table in Brooklyn, NY, with my children attending school via video in the next room. It’s unbelievable that it’s been a year since the pandemic hit. My last time on a plane was visiting our Chicago site last February. I sat...
Our hearts are broken after the tragedies in Atlanta. Anti-Asian violence, misogyny, gender-based violence, white supremacy, xenophobia – it must end now. To our Jewish AAPI community, we are holding you close. We mourn with you and we stand with you. There has...
What is a citizen’s duty in upholding a responsible, criminal justice system? Our parasha addresses that question head-on with a seemingly clear commandment: “Any person who sins, having heard a public imprecation and is a witness, having seen or known, if they do not...
This week’s double-parasha is a verbose carnival of the mundane in service of the spectacular, of the grind of minutia in service of liberation. The Israelites bring abundant raw materials and the gifted artisans guide the construction of God’s traveling home, the...
Ours is a parashah of contrasts, of colossal misses. After the overwhelming revelation to the newly free people, Moshe spends forty days receiving the rest of Torah from God. Only at the end, does he find out that meanwhile, down below, the people, impatient at...
Our parashah brings the first big, detailed list of regulations for precisely how to build the Mishkan (Tabernacle), its decorations, and the items used in this portable sanctuary. On the north side of the Mishkan, in front of the altar, stood a table, and on that...
Immediately on the heels of the sensational introduction to the Revelation at Sinai via the Ten Commandments, the Torah grounds those lofty principles into the nitty-gritty of civil law: this freedom thing is going to be real. That’s our parasha, “Mishpatim”/“Laws”,...
The following remarks were given by Rabbi Lauren Tuchman, Avodah’s Ruach Avodah Spiritual Advisor, on February 3, 2021/22 Shvat, 5781 at the #JDAM (Jewish Disability Awareness Month) kickoff, hosted by Jewish Federations of North America. I would like to begin...
This week, we make it official. After the desert adjustment period of acculturation and habituation to some tastes of commandments in last week’s parasha, this week, we come to Mt. Sinai, with clouds, thunder, lightning, mixed-up senses, and fearful preparation, and...
Our parasha opens with the first steps of the free, Jewish people. Then, Psyche! Here comes the Egyptian army, and in case there were remaining doubters after the ten plagues and the Egyptian population handing over their property to send us free, a mind-bending...
And then we went free. After 400 years in Egypt, 210 of them endured in slavery, after ten mind-bending and terrifying plagues, Phara‘oh finally cracks, “and he called out to Moshe and to Aharon at night and said, ‘Get up, get out, from among my people: both you and...
Movement work is hard. Paths to possible victories pass through certain defeats. It is impossible to do the work of justice and liberation without bouts of debilitating self-doubt and glimpses over the precipice of despair, when we think we’re not helping, but only...
And, then, all of a sudden, we were enslaved. This week, we begin the book of Sh’mot/Exodus. Before we can even get settled in our seats, we’re plunged into slavery, in just a few verses. How did it happen? How did a minority group who had received favorable immigrant...
“Shim‘on and Levi are brothers, weapons of violence their trade” (Bereishit/Genesis 49:5). Four weeks ago, in Parashat VaYishlah, we read of Shim‘on and Levi’s premeditated massacre of all men of the town of Shekhem in order to rescue their sister Dinah, from...
Parashat Va-Yiggash (Bereishit 44:18-47:27) Rabbi Aryeh Bernstein, Avodah National Jewish Educator For the past week, we have dwelled in the strange and tense pause between the beginning of Yehuda’s speech to Yoseph, at the end of last week’s parasha, and...
Our parasha begins with Yoseph in prison. Despite his stunning good looks, his charisma, and talents, in the land of Egypt, he is alone, destitute, and vulnerable. Framed for a sexual assault he didn’t commit by someone who actually tried to assault him, but powerless...
This week’s parasha is the first installment of the enthralling riches-to-rags-to-riches saga of the life of Yoseph. This epic power story unfolds uninterrupted for three weeks, with the exception of chapter 38, in the middle of our parasha. At a moment of high drama,...
This week, we’re going to talk about violence. It will take us a little more time than usual, as this loaded topic may require, and I offer a content warning that this essay and the texts in it refer to violence, including sexual violence. This week’s parashah tells...
Rabbi Aryeh Bernstein Avodah, 5781 It seems intuitive that truthfulness should be paramount in religious life and in fact, the Torah teaches bluntly in the civil code, “From a lying word stay far away” (Exodus/Sh’mot 23:7). This mitzvah is directed to judges; in our...
Yitzhak: The Dispossessed Building Solidarity with the Dispossessed Parashat Hayei Sarah (Bereishit/Genesis 23-25:18) Rabbi Aryeh Bernstein, Avodah National Jewish Educator, 5781 Hayei Sarah is a parashah of stinging irony. We enter the parashah wondering how Sarah...
This week’s parashah begins the story of the Jewish people. All people mythologically descend from Adam and Eve and through the one remnant of their descendants, Noah, as we read last week. From here on out, the Torah will narrow its focus onto one descendant of Noah,...
Sylvia Finger and Jill Israel were honored at Avodah’s 2020 Annual Partners in Justice event in New Orleans for their efforts to organize and register more than 9,000 new voters in just two years through their work with the Engaging New Voices &...
By Rabbi Aryeh Bernstein, Avodah’s National Educator This week’s Torah portion births the first of everything in our mythical memory. In the second of our two, deliciously irreconcilable creation stories, the two original humans are placed in a utopian garden in...
By Rabbi Aryeh Bernstein, National Jewish Educator for Avodah This week, we read two short Torah portions. (Some portions are flexible and sometimes go solo and sometimes team up, depending on calendar features, such as if a holiday fell on Shabbat, pushing a...
Black Lives Matter. We join a growing chorus of individuals, organizations, and institutions proclaiming this statement to affirm the dignity of Black lives and call for an end to structural racism. More importantly, while we know that a statement is powerful,...
The following speech was given by Avodah Service Corps Member Julie Schreiber at Avodah’s 2020 virtual Partners in Justice Gala. How will we remember this time? I ask myself this every day. During crises – or “unprecedented times,” as our bosses love to call...
To our Avodah community, Last week, George Floyd died under the knee of a police officer, gasping that he couldn’t breathe. It is heartbreaking that just a few years after Eric Garner died with these same words, we are back in this place. So many lives gone. So...
We are about to enter Shavuot, marking the Israelites’ gathering at Mount Sinai to receive the Torah. At this point in the Israelites’ story, they have just undergone a seismic shift out of slavery, and their journey begins to intertwine revolution with...
By Sarra Alpert, Avodah National Program Director The word mitzrayim, the Hebrew name for Egypt, is often defined as “narrow straits,” framing the Exodus story that we recount at Passover, a narrative of emerging from a constrained existence as slaves into liberation...
In Fall 2016, Avodah convened a Racial Justice Task Force comprised of staff, alumni, Board and Advisory Council members with the goal of strengthening Avodah’s racial justice work, both internally and externally. The Task Force had several recommendations that were...
During Sukkot, one of the most important actions we are called upon to take is to welcome strangers and offer shelter to guests in our sukkah. Amidst the greatest refugee crisis in recorded history, the need for shelter and protection has never been more clear. And...
During the High Holidays – the Days of Awe – we take a moment to reflect on both ourselves and the shared history of the Jewish people. Through T’shuvah – deep prayer and returning – we have the chance to renew and recommit ourselves to Tzedek...
Throughout Black History Month, we honor and celebrate the numerous contributions millions of Americans have made to our country. We also know that the recognition of Black excellence and discussions about race and racism must not be relegated to just one month. To...