Nisan, of course, is also the month of Pesach (Passover), the most labor-intensive holiday of the year. For many families, Rosh Chodesh Nisan marks the beginning of the long process of cleaning out the entire house of chameitz (any food made from grain that is not matzah) and getting ready for the seder. This is, in fact, what the Israelites did to prepare for the first Pesach when they were still slaves in Egypt. We read in Parashat Bo:

Adonai said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, "This month is your first new month of the months of the year. Tell the whole community of Israel, 'On the tenth day of this month, each of you will take a lamb (or kid) to your household, one lamb for each family.… It will be yours to watch over until the fourteenth of this month, when you will slaughter it, all of the gathered community of Israel, at twilight.'… In the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month, in the evening, you shall eat matzah until the twenty-first day of the month, in the evening. For seven days, nothing leavened shall be found in your house, for anyone who eats chameitz, that person shall be cut off from the community of Israel, whether stranger or citizen of the land." (Exodus 12:1-3, 6, 18-19)

Imagine. From the tenth day of the month, each family had that little lamb or baby goat in their home. They heard it bleating for its mother. The children played with it. 

For more than four days the Israelites watched over that little animal, knowing what its fate would be as they cleaned out the chameitz from the entire house. They knew that, once their work was done, it would be more than a meal. It would be their escape from the angel of death and a ticket to freedom. The blood of the baby animal would be painted above the doors of their houses. The meat would be the main course, eaten with matzah and bitter herbs, at the first seder. 

This is what it means to prepare for the seder, to prepare for our freedom. It means painfully watching the death of something that you have gotten used to. It means allowing yourself to be uncomfortable about saying goodbye. It means constantly having to remind yourself that there is a good reason for going through all of this. Slavery is hard. Giving up slavery can be hard, too.

There is still real slavery in this world, but most of us will never know it. (Be grateful for that.) On Pesach, we can focus on a different kind of slavery. It is the slavery of all the habits and bad behaviors that we cling to—the way we won't give up eating things we shouldn't, using our power in ways we know we shouldn't, giving in to our anger and fear in ways that hurt us. Letting go of all that is more difficult and more painful than scrubbing the bottom of the bread drawer or cleaning out the black gunk stuck the inside walls of the refrigerator.

Preparing for Pesach is intense and it is meant to be difficult. This Shabbat, we remember what it means to prepare for a new beginning and to suffer over the little things that we fear to let die. We just have to remind ourselves, over and over, that it is our ticket to a new world of freedom.


Other Posts on This Topic:
Bedikat ChameitzShabbat HaChodesh: Prepare for Freedom!

What happens when a law written in the 1930s collides with the medical technology and social patterns of the 21st century? That is the essential question of a case argued today before the United States Supreme Court. It is also the kind of question that Jewish tradition must grapple with all of the time. It presents a legal puzzle that is excruciatingly difficult for us to solve, but we should be delighted to have the opportunity.

The law in question is the Social Security Act, as amended by Congress in 1939. The technology in question is in vitro fertilization, the medical technique devised in the 1970s for fertilizing human egg cells with sperm in a laboratory to be implanted into a woman's uterus for normal pregnancy and birth. The case involves a woman, Karen Capato, whose doctors performed the procedure in 2003 to allow her to become pregnant with sperm from her husband, Robert Capato, who had died a year earlier. After giving birth to twins, Ms. Capato sought Social Security benefits for her children. This is a benefit, she argues, to which the twins are entitled as the surviving children of a deceased wage-earning parent. 

The Social Security Administration denied Ms. Capato's claim, as it has done in roughly one hundred similar cases, because of the way that it interprets the Social Security Act. The Social Security Administration states that Ms. Capato's twins are not eligible for the benefit because they are not her husband's legal heirs according to the laws of our great state of Florida. Of course, it would have been difficult for Mr. Capato to have listed the children in his will, since he died before they even were conceived.

What a lovely, convoluted dispute. Either Ms. Capato is right, and children can be the dependents of a man who did not live long enough for them to have ever depended on him, or the Social Security Administration is right, and a man can sire children with his wife and still not be their father. What a mess. How do we find a way out of it?

This is where the U.S. Supreme Court steps in. The court must decide how to interpret a law about parents and children that was written before the discovery of DNA. They must, somehow, answer questions about the intent of the law regarding the realities of frozen sperm, in vitro fertilization, surrogate pregnancy, and a host of other new technologies and techniques that the writers of the law could not have anticipated.

And that does not even begin to explain the difficult in interpreting the law in this situation.

During oral arguments today, members of the Supreme Court raised further questions. Does the fact that Karen Capato was married to Robert Capato make any difference to the outcome of the case, or could a mother seek benefits for children from any deceased sperm donor? What definition of "child" and "parent" should be used in interpreting the law? When members of Congress used the word "child" in 1939, they were thinking about the offspring of a legally married couple. Does using that definition make any sense today considering the social realities of 2012? 

The difficulty facing the Supreme Court in interpreting the Social Security Act arises not just because of changing medical technology. The problems are even more deeply rooted in the changes in the assumptions, social conventions and patterns of our entire society. 

Yet, interpretation is the only choice in a case like this. How could it be otherwise? It would be foolish to insist on following the "literal meaning" of the law. In 1939, children who came into the world like these twins literally did not exist. It would be equally pointless to demand that we follow the "original intent" of the people who wrote the law. Even if we could go back in time to ask them, do you think they could answer questions about in vitro fertilization any better than we can? 

Whether we like it or not, interpretation is the only way to make this law work for this situation in the present day. There is no "plain meaning" to fall back on. We are stuck having to answer unanswerable questions like, "When is a 'child' in 1939 not a 'child' in 2012?"

I am not, by any means, a scholar of U.S. law, so I may have misunderstood some of the legal subtleties in this case. (I offer my apologies to lawyers everywhere.) However, I find this case fascinating for what it teaches about the nature of law and interpretation—issues that strike the core of Judaism. 

When the rabbis of antiquity and of our own day try to interpret the Torah, they are not dealing with a document that was written for the technology and social conventions of a mere seventy years ago. The Torah, if you believe historians, came into its present form around the fifth century b.c.e.—a time when most people were slaves, everyone lived in mortal terror of a bad harvest and the starvation it would bring, justice was barely distinguishable from vengeance, and knowing how to read would make you a member of the intellectual elite.

Fitting the society for which it was written, the Torah contains laws about the right way to kill the guy who murdered your cousin, laws about which grasshoppers are okay to eat, and laws about how to marry a woman you captured in battle. The Torah assumes, to say the least, a completely different world from the one in which we live. The rabbis of the Talmud, who lived some 800 years after this, were baffled by many of the laws in the Torah. Today, 2,500 years after the time of Ezra the Scribe, we are lucky just to be able to read it. Yet, for more than two thousand years, we Jews have struggled to interpret the Torah to apply it to the needs of the times. 

And it's a good thing, too. If observing the Torah meant that we had to recreate the world that produced the Torah, we would be stuck in a late-iron-age reality of disease, illiteracy, famine and short, miserable lives. Interpreting the Torah is the only option we have to keep it alive.

As with the laws of our country, it is pointless to believe in an "original intention" or "literal meaning" of the Torah that will guide us to certainty. We learn what we can about the time and place in which the Torah appeared, but we still have such a poor understanding of that society that we often struggle just to understand the plain, surface meaning of the text, let alone the intentions. Even if we could know how the people who first heard the Torah understood its meaning, that would not tell us how to apply it to situations they could not have imagined. 

Figuring out how to read the Torah in a world of light bulbs, internal combustion engines, climate change, presidential elections, multiculturalism, and imitation crab meat is difficult. The alternative, though, is to stick our heads in the sand and pretend that nothing in the world has changed since Judah the Prince completed the Mishnah. Interpretation means that we can change. It also means that we can discover the things within the Torah that never change—its values, its beauty, its story about the way we come to know God.

I do not know, and I am not qualified to predict, how the U.S. Supreme Court will decide on the Social Security benefits that Ms. Capato claims for her twins. I am led to believe, though, that they will weigh the meaning of the words of the law against what they can reckon about the people who created those words. Before they are done, they will think about what is right, what is fair, and what will help create the best society we can have right now. Then they will forge an answer that can be explained using the words of a great legal tradition.

That is also what we do with Torah when we undertake the joyful act of interpreting it. We consider the context, as best we can understand, in which Torah was given. We think about the moral and spiritual lessons of Torah and how they have been understood by all our great teachers since Sinai. We use the forms, symbols and words of our people to express a Torah that embodies the highest within us for the world around us.

Other Posts on This Theme:
Mishpatim: The Purpose of the Torah
Vayeshev: Dreams and Dreamers
Pinchas: Five Sisters Who Turned the Key to Unlock the Torah

Moses convoked the entire community of the Israelites and said to them, "These are the things that Adonai has commanded you to do: For six days you will do your work, but on the seventh day you will have the holiness of a complete Shabbat day of rest for Adonai. Anyone who does work on it shall be put to death. Do not kindle fire in any of your settlements on the day of Shabbat." (Exodus 35:1-3)

Traditionally, the mention of Shabbat here, before the completion of the Mikshkan, is interpreted as a sign of the precedence of Shabbat over the building of the Mishkan. Based on this, the ancient rabbis derived the thirty-nine categories of work prohibited on Shabbat. Any work that could be connected to a large building project—from planting crops to carrying objects from one place to another—is forbidden on Shabbat because, as we learn from this week's portion, Shabbat takes precedence over the building the Mishkan.

There is another lesson, though, that we might take from the strange and repetitious appearance of the Shabbat restrictions at the beginning of this week's portion. It is not just that the commandment of Shabbat rest overrides the commandment to build, it is also that the very idea of rest should take precedence over the impetus to work.

Sigmund Freud wrote that human beings require two things to remain human: love and work. We need to love and to be loved. We need to have something to do that gives us a feeling that we are useful and have a purpose. Torah, though, suggests one more thing that we need—rest. We need to have time to sit and reflect on our lives. We need a time when our purpose is not to do, but to consider what all of that work means. This is what Shabbat is.

The odd thing, though, is that our tradition teaches that Shabbat rest actually comes before work. Before we even begin to work, we must take the time to reflect on our labors. It may not make logical sense—why take a break before the work is begun?—but it does make spiritual sense. 

Before we lift the hammer, plow the field, or start typing at the keyboard, we need to know what that work means. We need to understand why it matters. We need to reflect on how our struggles in life fit into the larger puzzle of a universe that is a mystery to us.

It can seem like human beings are the only animals that do not understand instinctively the need for rest. Every other creature appears to balance work and rest—like breathing in and out. We are the only animals who are in any danger of intentionally working ourselves to death. And we do it all the time.

When I see the way that people's work takes over their lives in our society, I worry. I see so many people who put work first—their number one priority. If our work life takes such a priority over every other aspect of our humanity, how can we be sure that we will ever rest long enough or deeply enough to ask the question, "What we are working for?"

Shabbat needs to come first—not just in time, and not just in law—but in our hearts. Shabbat, this beautiful gift of deep and spiritual rest, needs to be the touchstone of our lives. Shabbat is not just a break that allows us to catch our breath, it is the first of all of our holy days that allows us to find holiness in every other day.


Other Posts on This Topic:
Letting Go

Rabbi Nachum Twerski of Chernobyl, the 18th century Chasidic master known as the Me'or Eynayim, compared the Mishkan to a person's soul, another "dwelling place" for God. Like the Mishkan, there is something pure about the human soul that makes it a fitting place for God to dwell. But our souls do not stay pure in this world. Once we are born, our souls become sullied by our imperfections and failings. How then will God dwell within us?

To answer this, the Me'or Eynayim looks to a famous passage from the Talmud that says that we learned the entire Torah in the womb, only to have it slapped out of us in the moment before we were born:

A light burns above the head of an embryo in the womb and it looks and sees from one end of the world to the other… There is no time in which a person enjoys greater happiness than in those days, for it is said, “O that I were as in months gone by, in the days when God watched over me” (Job 29:2).… The embryo is taught all the Torah from beginning to end… As soon as it sees the light, an angel approaches, slaps it on its mouth and causes it to forget all the Torah completely. (Babylonian Talmud, Niddah 30b)

The Me'or Eynayim observes from this passage that we had the merit to learn the Torah while we were in the womb because, at that time, we were a proper dwelling-place for God, pure and perfect. As we were exposed to the world beyond the womb, though, we had to forget. The angel who slapped us on the lips anticipated the reality of this world. Purity is not so easily achieved in a world of shadows and uncertainty. 

Why did God bother to make the world this way? Why make us with the purity needed to be a vessel for Torah only to take it away from us? Me'or Eynayim answers that it was so we would have the free will to learn Torah painstakingly for ourselves. It was so that we could choose to heed the Torah and earn reward, or ignore the Torah and deserve punishment. Torah cannot work in this world if it is just planted in our brains to direct us like an automaton. We have to choose—and choosing contains the possibility of failing. 

But, in this case, failure is not all bad. Failure offers with it the possibility of repentance, t'shuvah. We do t'shuvah to bring God and Torah back into us, just as it was when we were in the womb. Ironically, we can be even better here than we were in the womb—better in this world of imperfection because here we get to choose Torah. 

We are, like the Mishkan, created to be dwelling places for God. However, being a God-vessel is not easy and it is not automatic for beings that have to contend with the realities of this world. We have to work for it. We have to strive for it. We have to fail and apologize and forgive ourselves over and over again. 

Yet, we do have within ourselves a memory of a time when God and Torah were as easy for us as receiving breath and sustenance through the umbilical cord. We can vaguely recollect the time when God was right there with us, hovering over the Mishkah, a light over our heads, so that we can remember what it is we are striving and struggling to remember.  

When we make our souls into a dwelling place for God, we are actually choosing the choice that was once all we knew.


Other Posts on This Topic:
You are What You Choose to Be
Pekudei: A Love Letter

For those who want to relive a bit of Purim, here is the video of the Purim Shpiel at Temple Beit HaYam. The shpiel was performed by Don Matlin, Terrie Welz, Beth Pennamacoor, Karl Drehobl, Jerry Shapiro, Steve Rozansky, Sam Friedman and Roseann Conrad. The script was created with the amazing talents of David Lane. Credit and gratitude for the creation of the video goes to Ruben York. Thanks to one and all. 

That is about as far as I will go in preaching the benefits of meditation. The practice has not made any startling or dramatic changes in my personality, or even in my habits and behaviors. Meditation has made me just a little bit calmer, especially when dealing with my fears and my anger. It has made me just a little bit more forgiving of other people, and also a bit more forgiving of myself. I laugh at myself more easily than I used to. 

When I teach and lead meditation, I try to emphasize how meditation works subtle changes on people, not big transformations. But there are times when that subtle change is all that is needed to help a person make better choices and become happier.

Meditation, for example, can help train a person to notice the way the anxious mind tends to run around in circles—thinking the same thought over and over again. When a person is able to recognize that pattern, he or she can say within, "Huh. I must be really anxious right now. Maybe I ought to take a few deep breaths and deal with this situation in a different way." It may not be much, but it helps.

I do not need to add to what others already have said about meditation's place in Judaism. When I was a kid in the 1970s, people thought that meditation was something that belonged to Eastern religions—Buddhism and Hinduism, but not Judaism. Nowadays, most knowledgable Jews recognize that meditation has been part of the Jewish vocabulary of spiritual practices since the time of the ancient rabbis. 

Still, I think there is plenty of room to make the average "Jews in the pews" more aware of meditation as a Jewish practice. In addition to the weekly meditation service I lead, I also introduce some meditation practices into the congregation's regular worship. Here are a few meditative moments I include in the services I lead:

1) Before the Chatzi Kaddish. The Chatzi Kaddish serves as a transition marker in Jewish liturgy. We recite it on Friday nights to mark the transition from Kabbalat Shabbat (the service for welcoming Shabbat) into Ma'ariv (the evening service). In the morning service, it takes us from the spiritual warm-up of P'sukei D'Zimra into the Bar'chu, the call to prayer. I use the transition as a moment to ask people to pay attention within. "Before we begin the Chatzi Kaddish," I say, "just take a moment to notice how you are feeling right now. How has the experience of praying in this community changed you? How do you feel differently in your body now from the way you felt when you first entered this room? Before the Chatzi Kaddish, we take a moment in silence to notice."

2) During the Silent Amidah. I emphasize how the Amidah (also called the T'filah, or the Sh'moneh Esrei) is our moment for being with God. Other blessings in the service talk about God, but the Amidah is the pre-eminent prayer in which we talk to God. I suggest to congregants that they use the silent Amidah as an opportunity to find their own way to God, either with the traditional words of the liturgy, with the words of their own hearts, or in sacred silence. I want to encourage people to make the silent Amidah a time for focussing deeply on their personal spiritual needs.

3) Niggunim. Meditation does not have to be silent. Singing the wordless melody of a niggun is a meditative experience that can transport a person out of the bind of self-conscious, analytical thinking. Entering a niggun, especially as part of a singing community, allows each person to slow the mind down and experience prayer as a moment of joyful connection. Blending your voice into the voices of a congregation in a niggun is a way of joining something larger than yourself.

What are the meditative moments in prayer that do the most for you? How do you bring meditation into your Jewish spiritual life?


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Why Pray?

This is the sermon I am delivering tonight at Temple Beit HaYam.

If you have ever been a parent—and, perhaps, if you have ever been the child of a parent—you know about the frustrating experience of reacting to children’s misbehavior. As parents, we love our children even when they do not behave the way we want. But knowing how to love a child when he or she misbehaves is one of the greatest challenges we experience as parents.

Of course, we get angry. Of course, we are tempted to yell at them and to tell them how disappointed we are in their behavior. We also know, though, that the instinct to yell and chastise should be considered carefully. We do not want to become so angry that the only thing the child hears is a message that says, “You are bad.” We want to make sure that we get across a message that explains what we find unacceptable about the child’s behavior, not about the child’s person. We want to reassure our children that we love them while we also send a clear message about the consequences of bad behavior and our hopes for future improvement.

Good parents know that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to the dilema of parenting through bad behavior. There are some situations that might be best addressed with a mild reprimand—such as, “I saw that, Rachel, and I did not like it.” There are other situations that call for sterner consequences, such as the loss of a privilege, the demand for a direct apology, a “time out,” or paying back a loss suffered because of a hurtful action.

The question that parents should ask themselves before reacting to a child’s misbehavior—and I know this is difficult—is this: For whose sake am punishing this child? Is the consequence I am decreeing for the sake of the child’s benefit? Am I doing it because of some personal need for myself? Or, is it for the sake of some other person? When we are clear with ourselves, as parents, about who benefits from our response to bad behavior, we are more likely to make good choices that help direct the child to better behavior in the future.

This week’s Torah portion, Ki Tisa, tells us a story about misbehavior, about punishing bad behavior, and about the motivation behind the punishment. The story is one that you know. It is the story of how the Israelites built a Golden Calf, an idol to worship, even while Moses was on top of Mount Sinai receiving the tablets of the Ten Commandments directly from God.

According to the Torah, at the end of forty days on the mountain, God told Moses what the Israelites had done. God decreed that the Israelites would be destroyed for their sin and that God would form a new covenant with Moses’ descendants. Moses had to argue with God not to destroy the Israelites, and, instead, to have compassion on them. Once God’s anger relented, Moses went down the mountain with the tablets. When he reached the Israelites at the base of Mount Sinai, he heard their singing and saw their dancing as they worshipped the Golden Calf. The Torah tells us: 

“As soon as Moses came near the camp and saw the Calf and the dancing, he became enraged. He sent the tablets from his hands and shattered them at the foot of the mountain” (Exodus 32:19).

Now, you may think that you know why Moses smashed those tablets written by the hand of God. You’ve seen the movie and you remember the anger that was on Charlton Heston’s face when he lifted the tablets over his head and brought them down. It is a moment that might remind you of how angry you felt when you saw your child doing something wrong. It might remind you of how you felt when you saw your mother or father become enraged with your behavior. In our imagination, Moses smashed the tablets in anger. 

However, there is far from a consensus among Judaism’s classical commentators about this. The smashing of the tablets was certainly a consequence of the Israelites’ bad behavior, but it is not clear what feelings or motivations in Moses brought it about. Understanding that moment can be a way for us to understand our own choices as parents when a child does something that makes our blood boil.

Deuteronomy Raba, a collection of midrashim from the 1st or 2nd century, agrees with Cecil B. DeMille that the main emotion going through Moses’ mind was sheer rage. However, the midrash wonders why Moses became so angry only after he came down the mountain. God already had told Moses about the Golden Calf when he was on top of Mount Sinai. Why did he not react with anger then? The midrash even has God asking Moses why he did not get angry until he saw the idol with his own eyes. God says, “Moses, did you not believe Me (when I told you) that they built themselves a calf?”

This midrash wants us to know that it was the sight of the Golden Calf that triggered Moses’ anger. Moses’ fury was not calculated or premeditated. It was a fiery, impulsive reaction. So much so, the Torah says, that he shattered the tablets that had been written with God’s own hand.

If we follow this midrash, we could compare Moses’ anger with that of a parent who punishes a child impulsively—a gut reaction to seeing something that is not right. You might say that Moses is like a parent whose response to misbehavior is for the sake of appeasing his or her own anger.

As I said, this is not the only interpretation that our tradition offers for Moses smashing the tablets. Rashbam—a twelfth century commentator who lived in France—sees it differently. Rashbam says that Moses acted more out of despair than anger. Remember that, at this point, Moses was eighty years old and he had just carried two heavy tablets all the way from the top of Mount Sinai down to the foot of the mountain. Rashbam asks, What gave him the strength to do that? It must have been some supernatural power that came to Moses from God and from the words of Torah that were inscribed upon the tablets.

Rashbam argues that, when Moses saw the Golden Calf, that power disappeared. In the face of the Israelites reveling in their idolatry, Moses’ strength weakened, or the tablets themselves grew heavier. When the Torah says that Moses “sent them from his hands,” Rashbam believes that it is because Moses no longer had the strength to hold them. Moses cast the tablets a little way from himself so that they would not injure him as they fell. 

According to Rashbam, Moses broke the tablets for the sake of protecting himself. He did it in order to save himself from the inevitable danger posed by the Israelite’s idolatry. 

For many parents, this is a familiar story. When we see our children misbehaving it can feel like we have been sapped of our strength. We act out of despair. We feel a great weight on our shoulders and we are not sure if we are even capable of raising children. Sometimes, when we react to our children’s bad behavior, we do so in a self-protective way. We order them to go to their room—and, if we are honest, sometimes it’s just to get them out of our sight. We might yell at the children some, but it is only to keep ourselves from crying in front of them. This is another example of parents responding to children’s misbehavior for the sake of their own needs, not their children’s needs.

There is also a third possibility, and this comes from the 15th century Italian commentator, S’forno. He says that Moses neither broke the tablets for the sake of appeasing his anger, nor for the sake of protecting himself in a moment of weakness. S’forno says that Moses did it for the sake of the Israelites.

According to his interpretation, when Moses saw that the Israelites were actually happy about the terrible sin they had committed, he knew that something dramatic needed to happen to change the way that they thought about themselves. Breaking the tablets, says Sforno, was a dramatic gesture intended to force the Israelites to reconsider their values and their choices.

Imagine, again, a parent who discovers a child misbehaving. Often, the child shows immediate remorse once he or she recognizes a parent’s disapproval and stop misbehaving. Sometimes, though, the child will have no awareness that he or she has done anything wrong and becomes defiant, even after being discovered, because the child feels no shame about what he or she has done. 

S’forno says that this is the situation in which Moses found himself. Moses was genuinely angry, for sure, but he also was concerned about how unaware the Israelites were about their own deplorable behavior. S’forno says that Moses’ display of anger was calculated to get the Israelites to understand the nature of what they had done. He hoped to awaken them to a moral awareness, without which, the tablets and the Torah would be meaningless to them. 

Moses, says S’forno, broke the tablets for Israel’s sake. He hoped to make the people worthy of the tablets by awakening them to the need for a moral structure.

This is like the response of parents who feel true anger but who do not let their anger dictate their response. Instead, they think about the message that will prompt their children to reconsider their actions. Their goal is to change their children’s behavior—not by coercion—but by awakening them to the seriousness of the choices they have made, by getting them to think about what they have done, and by encouraging them to make better choices in the future on their own. 

When we see other people behave badly—whether it is a child, an adult, a spouse, a friend, a stranger, or a public figure—we can get angry. Before we act on that anger, though, we should ask ourselves: For whose sake is my display of anger? Does it do any good? Are there times when displaying anger is not appropriate? Are there ways of showing anger that are more effective?  How can I use my anger to do the most good against things that are wrong?

Of course, when the person who angers us is a child—especially when it is our own child—the stakes are even higher. Instinctively, we want to do what is right for our children, but sometimes it is difficult to know what that is. By asking ourselves these questions, by focussing on actions that serve the needs of our children first, we can make wiser choices and raise children who are ready to receive Torah, a teaching about how to live a good life.

Shabbat shalom.



Other Posts on This Topic:
Vayetze: Righteous Anger
Ki Tisa: The Golden Calf Is Within Us