Click on the image below to download this week’s Family Edition of Covenant & Conversation for Tzav. The Family Edition is an accompaniment to the main Covenant & Conversation and is aimed at making Rabbi Sacks’ ideas more accessible to older children and teenagers. It includes a number of questions to enhance your Shabbat discussions, […]
Tag Archives: Judaism & Torah
The institution of the Haftarah – reading a passage from the prophetic literature alongside the Torah portion – is an ancient one, dating back at least 2000 years. Scholars are not sure when, where, and why it was instituted. Some say that it began when Antiochus IV’s attempt to eliminate Jewish practice in the second […]
TRANSCRIPT – Click here to download as a PDF Friends, I’m speaking to you in isolation, from my home in London. I wanted to express our thanks to all those who are fighting on the frontline of COVID-19. The doctors, the nurses, the keyworkers, the support staff, the teachers, the people filling the shelves in […]
Click on the image below to download this week’s Family Edition of Covenant & Conversation for Vayikra. The Family Edition is an accompaniment to the main Covenant & Conversation and is aimed at making Rabbi Sacks’ ideas more accessible to older children and teenagers. It includes a number of questions to enhance your […]
Sacrifices, the subject of this week’s parsha, were central to the religious life of biblical Israel. We see this not only by the sheer space devoted to them in the Torah, but also by the fact that they occupy its central book, Vayikra. We have not had the sacrificial service since the destruction of the […]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LDJDxY-5Rk&feature=youtu.be TRANSCRIPT – Click here to download as a PDF Friends throughout the world, This is an extraordinary moment for the world, when a virus is sweeping across humanity, bringing it to its knees in a way that the world hasn’t known to quite this extent for 100 years. And who knows whether this new […]
On Tuesday 17th March, Rabbi Sacks was interviewed by Emily Maitlis on BBC Newsnight about how the themes of his new book Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times* relate to the current Coronavirus situation. Please find the full interview below. * You can buy a copy of Rabbi Sacks’ book here (except in the United States or Canada where the […]
Click on the image below to download this week’s Family Edition of Covenant & Conversation for Vayakhel-Pekudei. The Family Edition is an accompaniment to the main Covenant & Conversation and is aimed at making Rabbi Sacks’ ideas more accessible to older children and teenagers. It includes a number of questions to enhance your Shabbat discussions, […]
Melanie Reid is a journalist who writes a regular column for The (London) Times. A quadriplegic with a wry lack of self-pity, she calls her weekly essay Spinal Column. On 4 January 2020, she told the story of how she, her husband, and others in their Scottish village bought an ancient inn to convert it […]
Click on the image below to download this week’s Family Edition of Covenant & Conversation for Ki Tissa. The Family Edition is an accompaniment to the main Covenant & Conversation and is aimed at making Rabbi Sacks’ ideas more accessible to older children and teenagers. It includes a number of questions to enhance your Shabbat […]
Featured image © Yoram Raanan Kol Nidre, the prayer said at the beginning of Yom Kippur, is an enigma wrapped in a mystery, perhaps the strangest text ever to capture the religious imagination. First, it is not a prayer at all. It is not even a confession. It is a dry legal formula for the […]
Lord Sacks says the West is in ‘dark’ times, but has faith that young people – Generation Z – will turn things around By Peter Stanford; first published in The Sunday Telegraph on 8 March 2020 It takes a brave man today to publish a book with the title Morality – or a foolish one. In […]
Click on the image below to download this week’s Family Edition of Covenant & Conversation for Tetzaveh. The Family Edition is an accompaniment to the main Covenant & Conversation and is aimed at making Rabbi Sacks’ ideas more accessible to older children and teenagers. It includes a number of questions to enhance your Shabbat discussions, […]
Tetzaveh, with its elaborate description of the “sacred vestments” which the Priests and the High Priest wore “for glory and for splendour,” seems to run counter to some fundamental values of Judaism. The vestments were made to be seen. They were intended to impress the eye. But Judaism is a religion of the ear more […]
The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, “Tell the Israelites to take an offering for Me; take My offering from all whose heart moves them to give” (Ex. 25:1-2). Our parsha marks a turning point in the relationship between the Israelites and God. Ostensibly what was new was the product: the Sanctuary, the travelling home for […]
Two words we read towards the end of our parsha – na’aseh ve-nishma, “We will do and we will hear” – are among the most famous in Judaism. They are what our ancestors said when they accepted the covenant at Sinai. They stand in the sharpest possible contrast to the complaints, sins, backslidings and rebellions […]
The quintessential Jewish expression of thanks, gratitude and acknowledgment is Baruch Hashem, meaning “Thank God,” or “Praise be to the Lord.” Chassidim say of the Baal Shem Tov that he would travel around the little towns and villages of Eastern Europe, asking Jews how they were. However poor or troubled they were, invariably they would […]
Our parsha begins with an apparently simple proposition: When Pharaoh let the people go, God did not lead them on the road through the land of the Philistines, though that was shorter. For God said, “If they face war, they might change their minds and return to Egypt.” So God led the people around by the desert […]
Sometimes others know us better than we know ourselves. In the year 2000, a British Jewish research institute came up with a proposal that Jews in Britain be redefined as an ethnic group and not as a religious community. It was a non-Jewish journalist, Andrew Marr, who stated what should have been obvious. He said: […]
In this week’s parsha, before even the first plague has struck Egypt, God tells Moses: “I will harden Pharaoh’s heart and multiply My miraculous signs and wonders in Egypt.” (Exodus 7:3) The hardening of Pharaoh’s heart is referred to no less than twenty times in the course of the story of the Exodus. Sometimes it […]