Here Is Wonder

This week’s Torah portion - the excerpt from the Hebrew Bible that Jews will read this week - is called Vayishlach . This story sees Jacob experience several key moments of transition and focus which help him to strengthen his, and his family’s, identity. Jacob’s estrangement from his brother Esau is finally reconciled allowing the two to depart, not as strangers, but as friends. For Jacob, this is the much needed antidote to fear and anxiety that have overshadowed him since the day he was born. A short while later, and finally able to stop running, Jacob wanders alone and wrestles with a stranger - wrestles with his own identity and the next steps to take on his journey. As he looks to the future, he wonders what the next chapter of his life will hold and ponders the short and long term decisions he must now make. Through this wrestling Jacob eventually emerges as ‘Israel’ - a name acknowledging that, with Divine guidance, he will have the ability to plot a new course.   Late...

I received my rabbinical ordination (s'micha) on Sunday, 3 July 2022 / 4 Tamuz 5782. My Presenters were Rabbi Jeremy Gordon & Rabbi Debbie Young-Somers. I was ordained by Rabbi Dr Charles Middleburgh. This was my address. --- I was raised by loving parents in a small shtetl called Hendon.  My childhood home was a beacon of Jewish practice and my formative years bathed in the glow of the richness of Jewish ritual and theology.  However, around the time of my Bar Mitzvah - my Jewish coming of age - I began to find the former cumbersome and the latter archaic and dogmatic.  I might never have re-immersed myself in Jewish life had it not been for one other vitally important thing ever present in my life - chesed .  Sometimes English speaking Jews translate chesed as kindness, but this does not do justice to our tradition.  The Hebrew root for chesed -  ח-ס-ד - appears in the Tanakh (The Jewish Bible) around 250 times and these can be translated in almost ...