Rabbi Mark Asher Goodman - Writings

Dvar Torah Yizkor Shavuot 5786 - Cut Strawberries

Sat, 23 May 2026 18:32:15 GMT

I have this powerful memory of my grandmother that pops up often, in fact, every time I’m cutting strawberries for my kids lunch, but also every time I take something for granted or don’t appreciate one of life’s small joys like a juicy tomato or a nice sunset. Once many years ago, when my grandmother’s hand was no longer steady and she could use my help in the kitchen, I was cutting the tops off of the strawberries for us, and she complained that I was cutting away too much of the usable good red fruit. I said grandma, its mostly the white part and the leaves I’m cutting. And she said ‘cut closer to the stem. Don’t waste any of it.’

Now, this was of course a practical request - my grandmother hated waste and was exceptionally frugal. She clipped coupons well past the point when she financially did not have to clip coupons. She stripped every bit of meat off of chicken bones. She put towels over the couch in the den so that it wouldn’t wear out or get dirty.

But there is something about being careful to cut a strawberry so as to maximize eating every bit of the sweet part and not waste any of the goodness that stays with me, both literally and as a metaphor for life that will stay with me always. My grandmother was constantly expressing, in ways big and small, that life is a gift, and every moment in life is a gift, and being alive is to be present in those moments, big and small. And of course a lot of that was because, as a holocaust survivor, she had known loss and deprivation in a way none of us do. But also she was just a really special person. She had an unflinching joie de vivre that has always inspired me in how to live. I am who I am today because she, and so many other wonderful people, instructed me by their example how to live a life of purpose.

A shul community is not just a place that a person terms for friendship or camaraderie, or a semi-anonymous prayer space where folks can find 9 other people to help them say kaddish or a free plate of tuna pasta salad – even though those things are important. A shul community is also a place where we live our values, and witness other people’s values rub off on us. It is not a place of Torah in principle, but a place of Torah in action, and in doing so, it becomes a place where we instruct one another about how to live a life of purpose in a million little lop-the-top-off-the-strawberries-but-not-too-much ways, day after day, week after week, year after year. We do it alongside Torah and Mitzvot, and in the presence of Torah, and in the name of mitzvot like prayer and study. But the main way in which we transmit and re-affirm the eternal values of God and the Jewish people is in the memories we create for one another in this place that give our lives lives of purpose.

And you have all done that for me these past five years as a rabbi here, not to mention the total 8 years I have been here as either member or staff. You have made memories for me that illustrate how to live a life well and with intent.

You do it in so many ways. Sheldon Catz does it by trilling the repetition to the amidah in precisely the same comforting way, each and every time he does it. Audrey Glickman showed me how the little things matter at a funeral a few years ago when the temperature at graveside was somewhere around 8 degrees, and yet she insisted on staying until all the other mourners had left. Barbara Rosenstein did it by giving me a tour of her house on a visit a few years ago and putting out the tea kettle for me and asking about how I was doing, even though I was the one who was supposedly doing a pastoral visit. Rich and Helen Feder and Chris Hall and Ronna Harris did it a few years ago when we created a small medical gemach - a medical devices lending library - in our basements and garages a few years ago. We have picked up and dropped off, receiving and given wheelchairs and walkers, kneescooters and rollators to 60 people in need over the years, but those interactions and loans have also allow me to console folks cleaning out their mother’s apartments after a passing or more importantly to let Chris or Helen do that work of consoling and connecting.

Kenny and Max Steinberg show me their zest for life in their epic 3 hour walks on saturday mornings together. Dee Selekman does it by making sure we all have breakfast every morning in minyan. Ira Frank does it by carrying someone’s child around the sanctuary to give that parent a little break now and again, not to mention showing up to morning minyan as often as he can and handing out honors. Paula Eger and Judy Bardack - excuse me - RABBI judy bardack, inspire me to be the best teacher I can by faithfully coming to as many Torah classes as they can and always asking sharp questions.

I have learned about life and how to live it from the roughly 35 benei mitzvah speeches I have helped our kids prepare. I have seen how impactful our religion and our tradition is in the 20 or so conversion students I have worked with. I have learned how to grieve and to be present and how to be consoled from the two dozen funerals I have performed. I have moments of laughter and song, and sometimes wanting to bang my head against the wall for lack of any hair left to tear out when working with the 120 or so religious school children I have taught. It’s in the religious services and youth tefillah meetings that I have attended - watching people argue for hours over whether the yahrtzeit list should be made shorter or longer, whether women should either emphatically encouraged or merely strongly directly towards putting on a tallit at the bimah, or how to best have children’s programming during covid. All of these small moments of lopping-the-top-off-the-strawberry have taught me something, about people, and reciprocally, about myself - what values I have, and what values I must adopt. Who I am, and how I must grow.

I love to find the perfect hassidic text, but also I don’t have the worlds greatest memory, so sometimes I entrust that God will reveal to me the right text in the near term that my imperfect brain can recall for the right moment. So while this may not be the greatest hassidic text of all time, it is, at least by Divine provenance and the limits of recall, the right text for now. A few weeks ago when we learned parshat Tazria Metzora, the text opens with the words “When a woman conceives and bears a male child, she shall be impure seven days; like the days of her menstrual infirmity she shall be impure.” The Sfat Emet, Rabbi Yehuda Leib Alter of Ger, uses that text as a pivot to talk about the forming of the human body as a material thing in contrast to God’s body, which the midrash teaches is effectively all the matter of the universe. But of course, if humans are created in the image of God, than the first human, Adam, was also the sum total of all the matter of the universe - if not in size, than definitely in shape.

He says ‘In the midrash it is taught ‘ “Front and back you made me” (Psalm 139:5); for the human is the form of all the world (Vayikra Rabbah 14:1). And thus, one human is the collective sum total of all.’

The Sfat Emet continues by saying:
ובאמת חומר האדם גם מכל הנבראים.
In truth, the physical matter of a person is more crude than all that was created.
כי האדם נברא שישלים את עצמו במעשיו.
But a person was created such that they make themselves complete by their actions.
וע"י שישלים חומרו הגרוע מכולם.
And this is done by improving the deficient nature of everything and everyone [around them].
יביא וימשיך קדושה לכל הנבראים מגדול ועד קטן.
One brings and continues holiness for all creation around them, from great to small.
לזאת כולם קדמו לבריאת האדם. רק אם זכה ובא לשורשו.
As such, everything came before the creation of Adam/the human. Only if one merits it will they come to The Source.

In other words, we were essentially made the same as all the other animals, and our bodies are crude and unelevated material. But. By lopping the tops off of the strawberries, and teaching the children, and making breakfast for morning minyan, and helping people grieve by showing up for their shivahs, and by living our lives in ways that we honor and remember how our departed loved ones made breakfast and showed up to shivah and taught children, we elevate our own crude matter into something greater, something befitting of the Divine image in which God fashioned us.
וע"י שישלים חומרו הגרוע מכולם.
And this is done by improving the deficient nature of everything and everyone [around them].
יביא וימשיך קדושה לכל הנבראים מגדול ועד קטן.
One brings and continues holiness for all creation around them, from great to small.
ובא לשורשו.
And they will come to Their Source - to God.

This all is reflective of a line we will soon say in El Male Rachamim, the ‘God full of mercy’ prayer, the penultimate prayer of the Yizkor service.
בַּעַל הָרַחֲמִים יַסְתִּירֵהוּ בְּסֵתֶר כְּנָפָיו לְעוֹלָמִים, וְיִצְרוֹר בִּצְרוֹר הַחַיִּים אֶת נִשְׁמָתוֹ
Master of mercy, shelter my dear departed loved one under your wings forever, and may their soul be bound up in the bond of life.

That line – may their soul be bound up in the bond of life – hangs upon me every time I sing it. It is so prescient and impactful that I literally feel it tingling in my arms and feel it heavy on my chest even before I come to it when I sing it in morning minyan or at a shiva or a funeral or an unveiling. And now I will tell you all something I’ve never told anyone before - although I think Mindy probably knows because she and I have a bizarre ability to communicate telepathically during morning minyan to the degree that she can raise an eyebrow and I know it means ‘rabbi you moved the belt for the torah too far on the bimah and now I can’t reach it.’ Here’s the thing I’ve never told anyone. When I started leading Thursday morning minyan at beth shalom four years ago Ira Frank paused the service and said ‘does anybody have an el male’ and I froze and thought ‘what in the fresh hell is this?’ Now, here’s the thing I know after 20 years in the rabbinate - every conservative synagogue thinks they do things exactly like every other conservative synagogue. But the reality is that while some have been saying page 87 faithfully every week since 1951, others have been skipping from 160 to 164 without fail every week, and generally the reasons for such things are because a religious services committee, after two and a half years of arguing about it, mandated it back in 1951 and moving forward everyone thinks it was handed down from Moses at Sinai. And so, in all of the other Conservative shuls I’ve been to, mostly on the West coast mind you, those who are observing yahrtzeit don’t come up for el male. But here we do.

And that means I sing el male a lot. Which is hard, because its an intense prayer, and of course it might then have a tendency to lose its intensity if I have to say four of them back to back to back to back. But because this is a person that someone loved very dearly, someone elses ‘lopped the tops off of strawberries’ taught me a life lesson person, I must say it with presence and meaning for them. So here’s the thing I’ve never told any of you. I sing the prayer slightly differently every single time, for every single person. I stretch a syllable for this one, and squish it for another. I pitch up in a spot for that persons mother but pitch way down for that persons husband. I warble the word rachamim for Chaim Yankel but hold the note on that word a little longer for Sarah Frumah. It gives the prayer a little more meaning - if not for the mourner, then at least for me.

And I feel like I have to, because those words ‘tzor bitzor hachaim’ - to be bound up in the bonds of life - demand that each of our deceased be treated like fingerprints, or like snow flakes. They were all somebody’s lop the tops off the strawberry person, and they each taught us how to live with purpose, and so they deserve the smallest kindness from me in trying to find a way to make them special. Because
ובאמת חומר האדם גם מכל הנבראים.
In truth, the physical matter of a person is more crude than all that was created.
כי האדם נברא שישלים את עצמו במעשיו.
But a person was created such that they make themselves complete by their actions.

…

That is a big reason why so many of you are here today to remember, to pray the holy and sacred prayer of yizkor. Someone in your life who was very special to you taught you something very foundational to who you are. And maybe that was something equally small like the right way to cut the top off a strawberry. And yizkor is about giving thanks and binding up in the bonds of life our departed, by remembering the lessons they taught us - that memory of them is tzarur - bound - to us in our actual lives bitzror hachaim. And also, each and every day the ways in which we live towards each other - with kindness and compassion, with acts of justice and righteousness, in honesty and sincerity - we honor our departed by the lessons they taught us, which we will invariably pass on not only to our children but to everyone around us in the ways we listen to another person patiently when they are down or go out of our way for each other when we need it - or when we show courage or leadership.

Because as much as we are, in the words of the sfat emet, physical matter of a person is more crude than all that was created, we are also made up of stardust and strawberry tops and Divine matter and we are bound up in the bonds of life by every one around us now and everyone that came before us. We remember to get the most out of life, every last bit of the red part of the strawberry, by remembering those who taught us to live with intention, and we honor their memory by living our lives as they would, or maybe even a little better, each and every day. Good yontiff, shabbat shalom.

Pete Hegseth is my piñata (exegetically speaking) - Shmini 5786 -

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 18:54:45 GMT

There is only one thesis for this dvar torah, but there’s a high-falutin’ academic version of it, and a spicier, more topical and current events-y version of it.

The academic question I pose today is this: what are the legitimate boundaries of scriptural interpretation and exegesis? What are the rules and limitations by which we might derive the authoritative meaning of a so-called Divine text in order to discern what is God’s will for us in terms of moral and ethical behavior?

The more controversial way to ask that question is this: how on earth can Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth claim that the Bible clearly says it is America’s moral destiny to vanquish her enemies in war, whenever and wherever they please? Can the Bible really be used to prove with prophetic endorsement that God has beknighted America with Divine authority to rule over all other nations?

I think you all know enough to know that at least this second thesis about Pete Hegseth is something of a setup. It is patently absurd to use the Bible in the modern era to prove categorically that God is militarily on your side, and that God has granted you the authority to make pre-emptive war whenever and wherever you please, because you are God’s chosen people. To some degree, I’m gonna put this guy and his ^^ biblical interpretation ^^ up like a pinata and beat the crap out it for a while in this sermon. And yet, I’m speaking about this today to alert you to the fact that our Secretary of Defense, the sixth-in-line to be president of the united states, has regularly invoked Christianity and Jesus as the basis for why and how the US engages in warfare.

I learned of this from an NPR show called ‘on the media’, led by journalist Brooke Gladstone, who interviewed a Baptist minister named Brian Kaylor who has been keeping an eye on the public monthly Pentagon prayer service that Hegseth leads, and the words and choice of verses that Hegseth uses, and is ringing the alarm bell that our military leadership uses scripture to justify violence. That was surprising to me, considering that Jewish prayer generally does not do that, and it was especially surprising to me because of the quotations from scripture that Hegseth has been using to invoke violence - they come from Psalms, and Jeremiah, and Exodus, and Samuel. In other words, the Jewish bible. And that peaked my interest. How do Jews read the Bible and come away with one approach to prayer, and another group of people - a group of Christian warhawks read the same bible and reach opposite conclusions? And is any read of the bible legitimate, or is it truly and fully ‘in the eye of the beholder’?

I’ve been thinking about this question long before I’d ever heard of Pete Hegseth. I remember perhaps more than 20 years ago reading the line we say every day in morning prayer in the song of the seas - “adonai ish milchamah, adonai shemo markevot paro vecheilo yarah bayam - God is a man of war, Adonai is God’s name, the chariots of Pharoah and his soldiers were thrown into the sea.” And I would think to myself - what does that mean ‘God is a man of war’? The simplest answer that fits the needs of a contemporary human in prayer is that God is present with a soldier when they go into battle - that God is with you when you fight. This would be a comforting idea if I were in the military, and so I can see a reasonable application of this verse. But what other interpretations could there be? Well, we could apply it in situ - only at that moment in the bible - to understand that it was God’s Divine will to lure the Egyptians into the red sea and then close the seas upon Pharoah and his army.

By the way, the keen reader will note that this account of the parting and collapsing of the red sea in Exodus 15 directly contradicts the version one chapter earlier in Exodus 14 verse 28, where it says

וַיָּשֻׁבוּ הַמַּיִם וַיְכַסּוּ אֶת־הָרֶכֶב וְאֶת־הַפָּרָשִׁים לְכֹל חֵיל פַּרְעֹה הַבָּאִים אַחֲרֵיהֶם בַּיָּם לֹא־נִשְׁאַר בָּהֶם עַד־אֶחָד׃

The waters turned back and covered the chariots and the riders—Pharaoh’s entire army that followed them into the sea; not one of them remained.

So did the waters collapse on them, or did God pick up all their chariots from off of dry land and chuck them into the water? The medieval commentators have a lot of fun with this problem. But the point is, if we are restricting the song of the sea poem this past Wednesday, the seventh day of Pesach, to referring only to God, the man of war, in the biblical event of the red sea crossing, then God is simply being thanked for making war that one time on the Egyptians. I have a third interpretation that you might like. Adonai ish milchamah - God is a man of war - could be taken to mean that God is keenly understanding of the suffering of combat veterans. Witnessing war and violence as either a neutral bystander or a combatant causes a lasting psychological reaction that can produce stress and anxiety and can be disabling or debilitating - a disorder that was once called shell shock or battle fatigue and is now referred to as post traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. I know a little about PTSD because I’ve experienced it myself, having witnessed a violent incident when I lived in Israel in 2004. Adonai ish milchamah, to me, means that God is with those who suffer PTSD, because God has been in those situations too and knows what you are going through. God knows the struggle of the widow and the orphan and the stranger, and sympathizes with them, and is with them, and in the same way, God knows the plight of the soldier experiencing PTSD and sympathizes with them, and is with them.

Pete Hegseth, of course, does not utilize any of these interpretations. In December Hegseth brought his favorite pastor, Franklin Graham, to the Pentagon, to preach a Christmas mass, and Graham said, “"We know that God loves, but did you know that God also hates? Do you know that God also is a God of war? Many people don't want to think about that or forget that.”

Graham goes on to justify this God of war argument by reading from a passage in the Hebrew Bible, which in that time and place was a call to genocide - a kind of no holds barred warfare. Samuel is telling King Saul to go and kill Amalek and all their cattle and sheep and their women and children. You’re all familiar with - First samuel chapter 15 - because we read it about 4 weeks ago - it’s the Haftarah to Shabbat Zachor. And you’re all aware that the Jewish tradition has - for centuries - understood the call to war against Amalek as a spiritual war against the forces of evil. And you all know that we read the verses in Samuel in situ and allegorically, much like we read the verse in song of the sea. Hegseth was reading it at the Pentagon prayer service literally - as a justification for a removal of all barriers and guardrails from US soldiers in combat - as a biblical injunction to ignore inconvenient things like the Geneva conventions or morality or the US military code of conduct when our soldiers go out to war.

In March,at the prayer service which coincided with the beginning of the war in Iran, Hegseth used a mix of Psalm 144 and Jeremiah 50 when he said “ Almighty God, who trains our hands for war and fingers for battle. You who stirred the nations from the north against Babylon of old, making her land a desolation where none dwell.” Psalm 144 is a prayer for soldiers that starts the way Hegseth quoted it, but then pivots to asking God to vanquish Israel’s enemies on the battlefield with lightning. It has two lines you will all be familiar with - one that gets imported into the Yom Kippur liturgy about fragile mortality:

יְהֹוָה מָה־אָדָם וַתֵּדָעֵהוּ בֶּן־אֱנוֹשׁ וַתְּחַשְּׁבֵהוּ׃
O ETERNAL One, what are mortals that You should care about them, human beings, that You should think of them?
אָדָם לַהֶבֶל דָּמָה יָמָיו כְּצֵל עוֹבֵר׃
They are like a breath; their days are like a passing shadow.
And the final line of 144 which we said about 10 minutes ago -
אַשְׁרֵי הָעָם שֶׁכָּכָה לּוֹ אַשְׁרֵי הָעָם שֱׁיְהֹוָה אֱלֹהָיו׃ {פ}
Happy the people who have it so; happy the people whose God is the ETERNAL.

In other words, in context, these verses are about human mortality and fragility and that we call on God to protect us if we should go to combat.

Hegseth used these verses differently, saying: “Grant this task force clear and righteous targets for violence. Surround them as a shield. Protect the innocent and blameless in their midst. Make their arrows like those of a skilled warrior who returned not empty-handed. Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation. Give them wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

Hegseth is doing something all clergy do - which is take scripture and interpret it for today - nothing wrong with that. But the pastors he cites and calls upon to direct the legitimate manner of interpretation play by some rules that are anathema to the way Judaism interprets Torah and Tanakh. Hegseth’s pastors, Graham and a man named Brooks Potteiger invoke American Christianity in a hyper-Calvanist “we are God’s will because we are God’s elect and the most mighty nation on earth” understanding. There’s a mismosh of a belief in Jesus and armageddon and might makes right and that we cannot fail because God and Jesus are behind the US Military.

To be sure, this theology does exist in the Torah - much of Isaiah and Jeremiah and Deuteronomy effectively say a sort of inverse version of that - IF the Jewish people keep the commandments and are moral, God will protect us from our enemies. BUT IF we do not obey the Torah, then the Babylonian or the Assyrian or the Egyptian or the Persian Empire will rise up as the mighty fist of God and give us our just punishments. And thus the Tanakh understands the vanquishing of Israel’s armies in 722 BCE and 586 BC as punishment for our losing our way.

Hegseth reads these verses in Psalms and Jeremiah out of context and upside down - BECAUSE America is so great and follows Jesus and BECAUSE God made us obviously the greatest nation on earth, we WILL defeat all comers, namely, this time, the literal modern day Persian Empire. It’s magical thinking. And it is illegitimate use of holy text for militant and violent purposes, and its end result is hubris and self-righteousness that will end in disaster.
It’s also an application of the Torah that went out of favor in Judaism about 2000 years ago. When the Roman empire smashed the Great Revolt in 70 CE, and again smashed the Bar Kochba revolt in 135 CE, the rabbis that wrote the Talmud deemphasized war, and statehood, and kingship, and armies, and Divine prophetic inevitability tied to violence. Having been the victims of violence by a powerful empire that utterly desolated the land of Israel, the rabbis of the talmud interpret the Bible going forward to teach us that we do not force God’s hand in global geopolitical matters through violence and the amassing of power. We are a spiritual people who are Jews not because we are bound to one land or one temple or one king by our might and armies. We are the people of the book and the people who act through commandedness, not prophetic calls to arms.

And I will add that Jews are guilty of this too. About 15 years ago a rabbi in Israel wrote a book called Torat HaMelekh - laws of the king - justifying Jewish violence against non-Jews for any purpose using this same kind of textual cherry-picking and illegitimate anti-moral justifications for violence. The book was roundly condemned and is mostly ignored today, but there are elements in Israel who dangerously use preferred parts of the Torah as theological justification to ignore moral laws in other parts of the Torah, and we should all be vigilant against this kind of perversion of Torah to illegitimate ends.

The legitimate path in Judaism of scriptural interpretation came through learning the hard way about violence, but the rules have been laid down and followed by your rabbis for literally 2000 years. We are taught by a rabbinic midrash the following:

Our Torah portion today, Shmini, is the story of two men, Nadav and Abihu, who brought an inappropriate offering on the altar that ended disastrously. Our words and our interpretations of Torah are the metaphorical equivalent today of offerings on that altar, and they should be holy and pure, and when they are not holy and pure, things end badly for all involved. May all our words be pure and holy. When you see Torah being twisted for evil by others, call it out for what it is.Meanwhile, may we all strive to read Torah within a moral context of right and just action with deliberation and context and humility - for Torah’s sake and not for our own sake or with any ulterior motives. Shabbat Shalom.

Click Tap Scroll - Parshat Tzav 5786

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 15:43:56 GMT

Dvar Torah for The Chronicle - Tzav 5786
link: https://jewishchronicle.timesofisrael.com/click-tap-scroll/

*Click*. *Tap*. *Scroll.*

“Global oil prices are soaring after yet another overnight bombing…” *Scroll*

“Denmark has deployed troops to Greenland, in fear of a US invasion…” *Scroll.*

“ICE raid on Las Palmas in Brookline - three are sent to a detention facility.” *Click.*

“Polling shows that antisemitism in the US is at an all-time high.” *Scroll.*

“Settlers in the West Bank today…” *Tap.*

“The senator replied that the pre-emptive strike on Iran was necessary because there was an imminent threat…” *Click*.

“An inquiry into the DOJ’s release of the Epstein Files shows that…” *Scroll.*

“A Polymarket trader made $553,000 betting on the exact date of Ali Khameni’s death.” *Click*.

“Another strike on a Venezuelan boat in the Gulf of Mexico killed six men…” *Click*.

“Tucker Carlson said…” “Josh Fetterman was quoted…” “Chairman Jerome Powell explained…” “Summer Lee released a statement…” *Click.*

“The explosion in Central Beirut targeted…” *Scoll.*

“Police are investigating after a man was rushed to the hospital after having been shot in the abdomen in Homewood South on Wednesday.” *Click*.

“Measles is back in the news.” *Scroll.* “The SAVE Act would require…” *Click*.

“A bill in Knesset would make praying at the Western Wall punishable with 7 years in prison.” *Scoll.*

“The Pentagon has requested an additional $200 billion for the war in Iran.” *Click*

*Click.*
*Click.*
*Snap.*

‘The fire on the altar shall forever be kindled; it shall not be extinguished.’ [Leviticus 6:6]

‘Rabbi Phineas in the name of Rabbi Simeon ben Laqish said: The Torah which the Holy One, Praised Be, gave to Moses, was white fire engraved in black fire. It was fire mixed with fire; hewn from fire, given from fire.’ [Jerusalem Talmud Shekalim 6:1]

‘There is a fire on which the offering is aflame, and it is in the heart of a person on account of the great inward awakenings of their soul. [Sfat Emet, Tzav]

‘There is a fire that consumes and it burns and devours, and upon it is a white fire.’ [Zohar v.1 50b-51a]

‘Oh, there is a light and it never goes out
There is a light and it never goes out
There is a light and it never goes out
There is a light and it never goes out’
[The Smiths]

Rabbi Mark Asher Goodman - Writings

Dvar Torah Yizkor Shavuot 5786 - Cut Strawberries

Pete Hegseth is my piñata (exegetically speaking) - Shmini 5786 -

*Click* *Tap* *Scroll* - Parshat Tzav 5786

Click Tap Scroll - Parshat Tzav 5786