Shabbat Shalom!

Please join us in shul this Shabbat Parashat Re'eh

THIS SHABBAT: Please join us to celebrate the Aufrufs of Miranda Alper and Alan Armony & Melissa Gotlib and Brent Katz STARTING AT 9:00!

This week’s parasha, Parashat Re’eh opens with God presenting the Israelite’s with a simple, though daunting choice:

“See, this day I set before you blessing and curse.”

The blessing, of course, comes through the practice of mitzvot; the curse through a rejection of mitzvot. Here the Torah tells us that is in our hands to choose how we want to live our lives. We may know the consequences of our actions, but the content of our spiritual lives is, ultimately, our own choice.

Rabbi Joseph ben Isaac Bechor Shor points out a tension between this verse and a Talmudic statement. In the Talmud Tractate Berachot, the rabbis teach: “Everything is in the hands of God except for fear of God.” If this is so, the Bechor Shor asks, if we do not truly have free will, then why does the verse in our parasha suggest that we have free choice between curse and blessing, between our tradition and a rejection thereof?

The Bechor Shor tries to resolve this tension. He explains that we are, in fact, free to choose between blessing and curse. God will not prevent us from choosing the curse. The door is open and we need only our own free will to cross the threshold. If we choose the curse, however, we are on our own. We must continue to make hard decisions about stepping closer to curse or turning back towards blessing. 

But, as soon as we take one even hesitant step towards blessing, God will come to our aid and guide us along the blessed route towards our tradition. We have free will, in other words, but our choices snowball. The more good choices we make, the more good choices we are destined to make; the more bad choices we make, the more likely we are to continue to make bad choices.

This is an axiom of human nature and the nature of community and tradition. The more Jewish choices we make—the more we choose to come to shul or to have shabbat dinner—the more likely we are to continue making those choices. 

There is a magnetism in our choices: The more we choose the good, our tradition, our community, the closer we feel to it; the less we choose the good, our tradition, our community, the farther we feel from it. It is in this way that, God sets before us blessing and curse and that those choices are in the hands of God.

Read more about this week's parasha here.

Have a gut shabbos!

-Rabbi Eitan Bloostein

To change how we relate to others, we must take stock our our relationships. We ask ourselves whether we are as kind as we hope to be, as understanding, loving, patient, and honest as we hope to be. For most people the answer is "no." Coming to that "no" is where the work begins. Only once we understand that we have to change, that we have to live up to our expectations of ourselves, can we engage in the sacred act of teshuva.

In Hebrew, we spell the month of Elul "אלול," the letters of which form the acronym for the verse from the Song of Songs "אני לדודי ודודי לי I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine." While throughout the year we think of this verse as a description of the love between partners in marriage, in Elul we begin to think of this verse as a description of the relationship between ourselves and God. Teshuva is not only about repairing our relationships with our friends and family. It is also about working to fall in love again with our tradition; to find ways to make it speak to us so that we can live up to our expectations as Jews. In Elul, we rekindle our relationships between ourselves and God and make the changes that help us live up to being the best Jew that we can be.

Read more about the month of Elul here.