Chanukah is quickly approaching and while big box stores often dominate this season of giving, we encourage you to shop small. Below are 16 Avodah alumni artists and makers whose creations offer something for every beloved person in your life (even the ones who...
Avodah New Orleans held its first in-person event in two years during Sukkot, gathering in the Sukkah at the home of Avodah Alum Dana Keren, and learning from longtime placement organization, The First 72+, whose mission is to stop the cycle of incarceration by...
Last week, we probed the Torah’s preemptive disgust at wealth hoarding, class entitlement, and civic irresponsibility, which crouched at the threshold of the Land of Israel, ready to seduce the Israelites as soon as they became securely housed landowners and stewards....
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...
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...
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”,...
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...
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...
The High Holy Day liturgical poem “Unetane Tokef” is one of our toughest pieces of liturgy. In reading this poem this Rosh Hashana, let’s begin to understand that our every action is — rather than being isolated and individual — intertwined with the well-being of our culture as a whole. Continue reading
Every day during this month of Elul, we blow the shofar as a wake-up call to our hearts and minds. It’s our reminder to take an honest self-evaluation, a real heshbon hanefesh, an accounting of the soul, so that we may take the necessary steps to create a...
REVELATION AND REVOLUTION: THE OMER Springtime in Jewish life is framed by two major festivals: Passover, the holiday of liberation, and, exactly seven weeks later, Shavuot, the holiday of Revelation. This period is marked by a daily count-up, focusing outward,...
This year, we had the disjointed task of celebrating Dr. King’s birthday on the precipice of a government set to go backward on many of the very issues important to him. Some folks think of Dr. King’s call as an opportunity to volunteer, participate in days of service...
Rosh Hashana is, of course, a time of new beginnings for all of us–with all of the introspection and opportunities to change our lives that it brings.And yet, for a lot of us, one of our tradition’s toughest pieces of liturgy shows up during the morning of...