A remarkable thing seems to happen in this week's Torah portion, Parashat Metzora - houses take on characteristics of people. Read more...

Sometimes we see it coming, and sometimes it catches us by surprise. Over the course of any given year we somehow manage to balance family obligations, work responsibilities, tending to our physical spaces, and, if we are lucky, we give ourselves a little attention as well. Still, there comes a point (or many points) in most people's yearly cycle when the sheer amount of work and responsibilities accumulate and overwhelm us to the point of exhaustion. Read more...

Modern men and women like to pretend that we have a direct pipeline into reality that we know, in an absolute and ultimate way, about ourselves, about the world around us, about true wisdom. Forgetting that previous generations were equally sure about the truths they “knew”, that the earth was flat, that the universe was a few thousand years old, that women were inferior to men, and that we now view their certainties with scorn, we presume that our most cherished verities will last forever. Read more...

Modern men and women like to pretend that we have a direct pipeline into reality that we know, in an absolute and ultimate way, about ourselves, about the world around us, about true wisdom. Forgetting that previous generations were equally sure about the truths they “knew”, that the earth was flat, that the universe was a few thousand years old, that women were inferior to men, and that we now view their certainties with scorn, we presume that our most cherished verities will last forever. Read more...

The Torah portions of Tazri’a and Metzora speak at great length of the irruption of skin disease and how the Kohen was used to re-establish ritual purity after the medical issues had been resolved.  In a sense, then, the thrust of this section of the Torah is to restore peace of mind and spiritual wholeness after the disruption and terror of dis-ease.  The opening lines of the joint portion, speaks of a different form of unusual discharge, that of birth: “When a woman at childbirth bears a male…” Read more...