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Hesped/Eulogy for my Grandmother, Rachel Baser Freisleben

9/1/2025

Hesped Rachel Freisleben

A few years ago we were I think getting ready for Passover, and Aster, my younger child, was helping out in the kitchen. Aster was about 8 or 9. And I said to him ‘and now I’m going to show you the secret to Grandma Ray’s chicken matzo ball soup.’ And he looked at me and said confidently ‘love.’

And I smiled, and I replied ‘soup cubes.’

Aster was right to assume that bubbie’s secret ingredient in her food was love. She was for all the members of this family the standard by which we all come to understand what love is. And not coincidentally, she very often expressed it through food. If she had picked up a particularly good basket of strawberries, she would say ‘oooh taste this markie.’ And my sister did a fantastic job of describing how her banana bread in the circular mold was just perfect - and that she never made one - she always made two and froze one for you to take home, along with a bag of groceries which she acquired with her coupons. One time she gave me a sack of groceries and on top was two cans of cat food and I said ‘bubbie I don’t have a cat’ and she said ‘yes but I had a coupon.’

But my grandmother’s relationship to food was simply an expression of her love for her family, which was a boundless and pure love, and I think taught all of us the very definition of love. Trying to explain and intellectualize Love is complicated and elusive, but for us it can be easily defined. We all understand love by the way Grandma Ray loved us - in hugs and laughs and food and the admonition of ‘put on a sweater’ even though it might be 90 degrees outside.

Her love was ever more amazing considering what a difficult and remarkable life she led. She was born September 18, 1927, in the town of Rakov Poland, which she would explain always as ‘not the big Rakov by Warsaw but the little Rakov between Czestechowa and Kielce.’ When the Nazis came through Poland, she and all the Jews of the town hid in the forest, and one day while walking to get bread from a farm with her sister Gela, the two returned to find all the other Jews of the town had been murdered. And since Gela passed a few years ago, my grandmothers death also marks a small moment in history - she was the last Jew of Rakov - the carrier of all the memories of that place. She and Gela survived by their wits and the kindness of a man none of us will ever know in a county registrars office who gave her false papers and a polish catholic name. Rachel came to America in 1946, settling in Santa Barbara by her sister, where she met John Freisleben at a USO dance. They got married, moved to Burbank, and had Marilyn, Alan, and Jerry.

There’s a longer version of this story, and I know it very well, because as a rabbi who has also taught or spoken about the Shoah, I often recount the story of my grandmothers survival, emphasizing or exploring different aspects in different years and with different audiences. And that’s always been a strange experience, because I think almost all of us know that Grandma never talked about surviving the holocaust, and never would tell that story. It was simply too painful for her. Instead, I was entrusted with that memory, and I take it as a holy responsibility to share it in a way that helps make sense of the senselessness of hate and violence for the people of today. When I teach the Holocaust class to Intro to Judaism each year, I take it as a sacred duty to do my best to reduce the inconceivable number - 6 million - down to just one family, and then impart upon folks that my grandmother is more than more than just a survivor, but a real person who as a young girl emerged from an enormous tragedy to build a life. Her parents and siblings are not just five more names on massive list of victims. There was once aplace called Rakov and a family called the Basers. So much was lost in their deaths, but in remembering them, I bring them to life again for a brief moment, and my students now understand that the loss of Rakov is a profound tragedy amidst a vast sea of tragedy.

But also, we, the Freislebens transcended that tragedy by rebuilding an odd new Rakov at 1824 Hilton Dr in Burbank California. In starting over and celebrating simchas and Jewish holidays together, John and Rachel created new memories to replace the old. We celebrated so many Rosh Hashanahs and Passovers in the back den at bubbie and johns - towels on the couches, grandma yelling at marilyn during the seder ‘hurry up! The brisket will get cold!’ She made such a great life for herself and for her family - and there have been so many joys and celebrations. One of the most remarkable things about her was, of course, her immense pride in the success of her children and grandchildren. It is something both incredible and incredibly American that a woman who came to this country with nothing, speaking no English and holding nothing beyond a middle school education would eventually see all of her children go to college, and then see all six of her grandchildren go to college, all the while beaming with pride every time any of us did well on a test or were given an award by saying, matter-of-factly ‘All my kids are smart!’

The last few years since Rachel’s stroke were hard - both for her and on our family. The stroke struck at her memory, which meant that she didn’t really remember where or when she was in time, or who people were – and it’s hard to see a grandmother who treated each and every one of her grandchildren as special be unable to make out who we were. And that was hard at first. But, for me, I moved past it with a simple understanding - and that is that Gramma Ray was not so much the sum total of her memories, good and bad, but rather, especially in her final years, existed in love. She was grateful to see us, and she knew she was loved, and as long as she was able to speak, she would say ‘I love you’ to us.

The central most prayer in Judaism is the Shema, and the second most important prayer follows right after it - the Ve’Ahavata - the prayer that tells us ‘and you shall love the lord your God, with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.’ And the traditional commentators of the Talmud and Middle Ages struggle with this idea. How are we to express our love for an infinite and immortal creator? The paragraph before helps with that understanding - the preliminary prayer to VeAhavta begins with the words ‘Ahava Rabbah ahavtanu, adonai eloheinu, chemla gedolah v’teira chamalta aleinu’ - with a boundless love you have loved us, oh God, with great mercy you have been compassionate’. And the prayer goes to mention the ways God loves us three times, and the way we love God three times? What is a deep and boundless Divine Love? I would never have known, if it were not for my grandmother, who loved others so deeply and so boundlessly that only God could be her equal. In her love I have an understanding of Gods love. In being blessed with someone as amazing and loving, I will be forever grateful. In commending her life and soul back to God, her love returns to the One that created her with an infinite capacity for loving others. The secret of God’s love is matzo balls. And soup cubes. And Gramma Ray.
…

In the words of our tradition, she is gathered to her people - returned at last to her parents, Malka and Asher, and her siblings, Simcha, Itzik, Gela, and Faigel, and to Johnny, who I imagine has been waiting in the beyond with his hearing aids making noise for Rachel to arrive and tell him ‘Johnny, you’re ringing.’

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Parshat Pinchas 5785 - Immigration Policy, Divorced from Morality

7/21/2025

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One of the reasons that America has always been an idea that fit neatly with the moral worldview of the Jewish people is this country’s origin and essential quality of being a destination for people who came from somewhere else. There were the indigenous peoples of this land first of course, but then many waves of migrants came to this place. There were many types of wanderers who came and stayed in North America over many generations: religious pilgrims and tobacco sharecroppers, African slaves and Spanish conquistadors, German and Dutch men seeking fame and fortune, and then the great mass of humanity that came at the end of the 19th century: the Irish, Italian, Polish, Jewish, Russian, and Slavic settlers whose descendants make up a huge proportion of the population of this country today. Most Americans came here from somewhere else, usually because wherever they came from, life was a struggle too great to endure. “Surely” they said “it must be better someplace else,” and that someplace else is America.

Judaism is the religion of the wanderer. In our morning prayers each day, we praise God for creation and the dawn and for our souls. But the first significant mention of the human condition and our origins as a people comes in Pesukei DeZimra, in a verse that I’ve been thinking about a lot the past few weeks. Quoting the book of Nehemiah, our daily prayerbook has us recite each morning: Atah hu Adonai haElohim, Asher bacharta beAvram, vehotzeito me’Ur Kasdim - “You are Adonai our God, the One that chose Abraham, and took him out of Ur Kasdim” - the city of Ur of Chaldea, which would later be called Babylonia or Mesopotamia.

Think about that for a moment. An omnipotent, infinite God could have started the Jewish people with anyone, and anywhere. It would make sense, then, to select a person of good moral character that rises to lead her or his nation in the place they were born - to form the first monotheistic religion with Avram in Ur, and to start it in Ur. Or to pick the king of the Philistines or the Hittites or the Moabites and raise them up to reject the panoply of gods of the ancient world and to choose the one God to obey. But no - God chose a wanderer. More than that - our text says ‘ve’hotzeito’ - God took him out - meaning it was specifically a Divine choice to have Avram go on a journey, as if the journey was an essential part of making Avram the person that he comes to be.

And then he sojourns down to Egypt and back. And Isaac, too, sojourns in the land of the Philistines in Genesis 26. And Jacob wanders after his clash with Esau, and down to Egypt during famine. And Joseph and his brothers wander because of famine, settling in a land not their own. And Moses wanders with the people for 40 years in a land not his own. In fact, the bulk of the Torah - at least 4 and ⅓ of the 5 books, takes place outside of the land of Israel. Many scholars have noted that the Torah ends with the people on the precipice of the land of Israel at the end of Deuteronomy, but outside of the land. The people enter Israel and conquer it in the sixth biblical book of Joshua, which for the shul-going reader, we effectively never get to. Every year we read the story of our wandering migration, and then, right at the moment we arrive at the land, we roll the scroll all the way back to creation. The reader of the Chumash is forever a wanderer.

Add to all that the additional layer of the entire concept for the Jewish people of galut, or gulus - best translated as ‘Diaspora’. After the destruction of the Temple in 586 BCE, our people relocated to Babylonia, with small populations taking up residence in Alexandria Egypt and Rome before a large number of Jews returned in 546. In 70 CE and 135 CE, Jews again left their land en masse and took up residence elsewhere - in Mesopotamia until the 900s, and then Europe in 1100s, and then north and south america in the 1800s. What do you think the rules were for these Jewish migrants? Anybody want to a guess as to when the first passports and visas were created? - let people guess -

1921. The passport was invented by the United States because of anti-immigrant sentiment related to the waves of mostly impoverished newcomers from what was seen by some as undesirable countries - Italy, Poland, Russia, etc. Quotas were set on immigrants from these and other countries to limit the number of immigrants that could come in. But how could the US determine where people were born? The passport was invented.

Before the passport, travel and residency for Jews, and for all humans, was basically unrestricted. Afterwards? Tightly controlled.

Now, let me not make it sound like Jews and humans had unfettered freedom of movement in the good old days. In last weeks parsha and the week before - Chukkat and Balak - the Israelites are on their way to Israel, and they have to pass through the lands of Bashan, and Ammor, and Moab. And the three kings of these lands were not thrilled with the idea of maybe a million people traipsing through their fields, livestock in tow, just passing through. The Israelites fight their way through Bashan and Ammor, and only because of Divine intervention with the prophet Bilaam are they able to cross Moab. But the core idea is still that lands didn’t have barriers and boundaries until very recently. Peoplehood was ethnic or tribal, not geographical, until about 100 years ago. And even in our lifetimes, this is on display. If you asked my grandmother where she was from, she’d say the town of Rakov, between Kielce and Schies-takov, in Poland. If you asked her if she was Polish, she’d say ‘absolutely not’.

What I am saying is that restrictions on the freedom of migration of any kind, and restrictions on who can work in a country or reside in a country, is not an idea that exists at all in Judaism. If a non-Jew wanted to live among Jews, and work among Jews, they even had a name in the bible - the ger toshav - the non-resident stranger that dwells amongst you. And of course, most of you know the often repeated idea in Torah that we are not to oppress the ger - and that the Torah tells us to care for the ger or not oppress the ger no less than 36 times. But I want to back up even a step before that and say that the very idea of restrictions on human movement is not a Jewish idea. It is an invention of the modern era, a fabrication of non-Jewish society that was at least partially invented to oppress, reject, restrict, and exclude Jews, among other undesirables.

By this I question and criticize the legitimacy and moral of the entire system of global migration restrictions, and certainly the American system. What purpose does it serve? One could say ‘well we need these rules so that foreigners don’t take jobs from Americans.’ There’s two problems with that idea.

First, it’s not moral. And second, it’s not true. There’s no logical connection between the happenstance of the place you were born in corresponding to the place you are allowed to work. I can move from Denver to Pittsburgh and get a job, but I can’t move to Toronto and get the same job. We can argue about the need to create an orderly system or the rules of taxation or the government’s system of social welfare, but those are all bureaucratic or economic reasons. None of those is a moral answer to why a person can be denied the opportunity to work or live someplace, because there is no morality to restricting human employment based on location. And our society kind of knows that. When the Syrian Civil War broke out in 2011, millions of refugees streamed into Turkey and Jordan. And of course those countries accepted them because their plight was so desperate. But the refugees overwhelmingly were not allowed to work, and their migration to other countries was severely restricted. Morally, nations of the world accepting refugees and giving them work rights is the right thing to do, without any doubt. Economically, though, each country behaves in protection of their own interests.

And there’s the second part about work restrictions protecting our jobs not being true. In the United States, there are millions of people working at jobs that folks born in this country simply won’t take. Farmworkers, nursing home employees, food service workers, gardeners, housekeepers, hotel workers – all of these industries are made up of a huge percentage of non-citizen visa holders, or undocumented individuals. If all of them were to be deported, there’s no way we’d have enough laborers to fill all of their positions. This country would grind to a halt. They’re not taking our jobs. They are caring for our mothers and grandmothers, and bringing us our tomatoes, and cooking our hamburgers. To quote one of my favorite authors and chefs, Anthony Bourdain, may his memory be a blessing, QUOTE ‘The bald fact is that the entire restaurant industry in America would close down overnight, would never recover, if current immigration laws were enforced quickly and thoroughly across the board. Everyone in the industry knows this. It is undeniable. Illegal labor is the backbone of the service and hospitality industry.’

Even though I questions the origins of our global immigration system, and even though I question whether such a system that originates in racism and immorality can ultimately be fair, just, or even benign, I concede that the global immigration system we have right now is the system we have, and it is not going away. Within that system, however, it is a Jewish act to expect that the system behave in a moral way. I think you all know that it is not.

Since February of this year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has aggressively moved to incarcerate and deport folks who were undocumented residents of the United States - including people in the asylum process, student visa holders, and green card holders that the United States had suddenly revoked status from. Additionally, another category of people that came to the US without documentation as children who have grown up here have also been swept up for imprisonment and deportation. And just recently the Supreme Court ruled that ICE and the US government have no obligation to return a migrant to their country of origin, even a country where a person might be tortured or killed as a political dissident.

The case in question was one in which the Department of Homeland Security deported eight men to South Sudan. The men were Vietnam, South Korea, Mexico, Laos, Cuba, and Myanmar. Only one was from South Sudan. They were not given the chance to plead their cases in court. Writing for the minority in dissent, Judge Sonia Sotomayor wrote, “The government has made clear in word and deed that it feels itself unconstrained by law, free to deport anyone anywhere without notice or an opportunity to be heard.”

This issue of migration and human rights has always been and must continue to be a critical issue of importance to American Jews, for so many reasons. It is important because our grandparents and great grandparents came to this country from somewhere else searching for a better life, and thus to pay that debt of freedom back to this country, we must stand up for the rights of the next generation of immigrants. It is important because we are a people who wandered for millenia without passports or citizenship rules.

And yes, we must also highlight and remain vigilant regarding this issue because it does directly affect our community. Jews, and particularly Israelis, are also being caught up in the ICE raids and sweeps taking place, and being deposited in ICE detentions centers across the country; including two local privately operated detention centers, the Moshannon Valley Processing Center and the Northeast Ohio Detention Center. But all these people in these places and others, Jewish or not, Israeli or Burmese or Mexican or Afghani, are all somebody’s son, somebody’s daughter, somebody’s sister, somebody’s parent, imprisoned for no crime and held without trial and in moral and legal limbo, effectively punished for the crime of having been born in the wrong place.

Our parsha this week is a long litany of sacrifices that pilgrims were obligated to bring to the temple at festival times - at each new moon, at Passover, at Shavuot, at Rosh Hashanah, at Yom Kippur, and at Sukkot. These were all pilgrimage holidays - holidays in which individuals travelled a long way, across other lands and over rivers and mountains and even across the sea. And they were asked to present not a passport at the temple, but an offering to God of appreciation and love and gratitude - a bull, a lamb, a ram, a cake of fine flour. We yearn for a return to the time when the free movement of peoples was the norm, and when it was done in its most ideal state as an act of love and community and gratitude. Shabbat Shalom.

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Conversion will help to secure the Jewish Future - BaMidbar 5785

6/6/2025

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Dvar Torah BaMidbar 5785

When I was trained to be a rabbi in beginning in 2001 at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies, in our second year lifecycles class, we were trained in the basics of converting people to Judaism. The majority of folks converting at that time were converting for marriage to a Jewish partner. The couples took the class together, and a few singles took it out of a purely religious and spiritual interest in joining the faith of Abraham and Sarah. But I want you to hold this thought about the makeup and popularity of classes for conversion to judaism. Put a pin in it. We will come back to it.

At that time, in 2001, the Jewish community was still all in a tizzy about the 1990 Jewish population survey which revealed high levels of intermarriage - around 40%. Affiliation rates to American synagogues were in decline. And overall, there was a deep and abiding concern about the demographic future of the Jewish community - about whether the American Jewish community, due to falling affiliation, falling birthrates, rising intermarriage, and general apathy, were slowly going to decline to oblivion. In his talks at youth conventions and hebrew school teacher symposia in this era, a beloved rabbi and teacher of mine used to take any available opportunities to cajole the assembled young people with these words on falling birth rates: he would say “your doing Hitler’s work for them.” He was eventually convinced this was not a compelling way to reach the young people to compel them to marry young and have lots of kids.

Nonetheless, 24 years later, the same anxieties exist in the Jewish community today about our numbers, our size, and our lack of domestic growth. It is a concern, or at least a worthwhile question, that our people have had for more than 3000 years.

Parshat bamidbar famously begins with a census, saying
שְׂאוּ אֶת־רֹאשׁ כׇּל־עֲדַת בְּנֵי־יִשְׂרָאֵל לְמִשְׁפְּחֹתָם לְבֵית אֲבֹתָם בְּמִסְפַּר שֵׁמוֹת כׇּל־זָכָר לְגֻלְגְּלֹתָם׃
“Take a census of the whole Israelite community by the clans of its ancestral houses, listing the names, every male, head by head.”

In short, the Torah tells us: count up the numbers. And list the names.

Now, this is not the only census the Israelites have been asked to do. There’s a census in Exodus 30, and another in Numbers 26, and one for the priests in Numbers 4. And different commentators either think these are different censuses - one for all people, another for military aged males - or that they are repeated versions of the same census.
The question then, and now, is this: how many of us are there? Are we growing, or shrinking, as a people? And perhaps, most importantly, what does that say about us? The fundamental anxiety revealed in the census, either the one in the desert 3000 years ago or the last Pew Survey of American Jews in 2020, is whether our children and our grandchildren will be Jewish; whether we as a people will shrink and shrivel away in this country to nothing. I think the answer is no. I think there are two reasons for this, which are actually intertwined.

First, the problem with a quantitative measure of Judaism is that it isn’t a qualitative measure of Judaism. By that I mean a survey that asks someone if they are Jewish doesn’t really tell you much about why they are Jewish, or how being Jewish is important to them. A person could tell the Pew survey, yes, I am Jewish. And the follow up question of ‘why’ might result in them saying ‘well my parents are Jewish. But I’ve never been to Hebrew school, I don’t go to synagogue, I don’t celebrate Hanukkah or Passover, and I don’t know anything about our religion or traditions.’ And its not that this person is doing anything wrong - they’re simply living their life. Their approach to Judaism is based on our historic tribal ethnic Jewishness. It is the conversation that folks had with my generation of Jews about what was important going forward. We were told that should meet a nice Jewish girl and get married and have Jewish children. And if we stopped to asked why, the answer was a fairly straightforward ‘so your children will be Jews.’ Quantity. But the question of what our Judaism consisted of was secondary.
Let me say it another way. For years I got to sit on a three rabbi panel with confirmation kids at Temple Emanuel in Denver. And the kids had to prepare questions and ask all three rabbis. And pretty much every year one card would be pulled and the question would be posed to me: why should I be Jewish? And other rabbis gave answers about tradition or family or community or God or chosenness, and they were good answers. My answer was this: be Jewish, don’t be Jewish, it doesn’t matter to me. But I think the Torah holds the secrets to how to live a meaningful life. And because studying Torah and commentaries is literally all I do all day, every day, aside from calling page numbers sometimes on Saturday mornings, I have the secret to living a meaningful life. If you want it, I will share it with anyone that is interested. If you aren’t interested, that’s totally ok too. It’s your life, you get to live it how you like.

Now that is a qualitative answer, and based on an approach to Judaism that regards it much more as a spiritual practice than a religion. It is, for some, a slightly heretical answer. In my day, being Jewish and carrying forward the tradition was expected, and the way to compel that expectation was often guilt, or expectation. ‘I did it, so you will do it.’ My answer of ‘it’s up to you, it’s your life’ - some people don’t like it because I’m not strident enough. And also, maybe, if I tell 10 kids they can chose if they want to live Jewishly or not, maybe only 5 chose to do it. Maybe it’s not a demographically successful approach. But looking at the trends nationally, Jews today are not basing their life decisions on whether their children will be ethnically Jewish - whether they will have two Jewish parents. The Pew Survey in 2020 showed that of Jews that married from 1990 to 1999, 37% had a non Jewish spouse. For Jews married from 2000 to 2009, 45% had a non Jewish spouse. For Jews married from 2010 to 2019, 61% had a non Jewish spouse. So as things move forward, fewer kids are growing up in households with two Jewish parents, and those kids are often not being raised to be Jewish. The Pew survey noted that when surveyed, 91% families with two Jewish parents reported that they were raising their children Jewish by religion. In families with only one Jewish parent, only 29% were raising their kids to be Jewish by religion.

These numbers might alarm you. They do not particularly alarm me. And that’s because they effectively fit the philosophy I described of why to be Jewish. It’s a spiritual practice of seeking the meaning of life, and the fact that some people opt out, or aren’t raised even knowing about opting in, is just part of living in a modern American society with infinite choice. We can’t effectively compel with guilt, or with a lack of alternatives today. Lots of Americans today are opting out of religion. If you were born Jewish in Minsk in 1889, there weren’t a lot of other lifestyle options available to you. Today, you can be, or not be, whatever you want.

But that brings me back to conversion, and introduction to Judaism. Some of you know, but many of you do not, that I’ve been the Director of Intro to Judaism for the Greater Pittsburgh Jewish Clergy Association for the past three years. ITJ as it is know is Pittsburgh’s course for conversion, or simply learning the basics of Judaism, for almost all the liberal synagogues in Western Pennsylvania. When I started teaching the class in 2019 we had roughly 10 students, and Sinai had roughly 10, and Rodef had 10. In 2022 we combined efforts across all the synagogues in the area and had about 30 students. In 2023 we taught about 45 students. This past year the number of students rose to 56. These rises track with what I experienced in Denver Colorado from 2011 to 2018 - every year we saw more ITJ students and more converts. My last year there, we were running two cohorts of students totalling 110 students. More and more people who learn about Judaism see it as a compelling religious and spiritual practice, and more and more people are converting not because their partner is Jewish and they want to raise the kids Jewish, but because they find Judaism compelling, and they want to live Jewishly, and they want their kids to grow up Jewish.

And it’s beautiful. I’m so lucky to have a front row seat to so many people who come to Judaism on their own. In the words of the Talmud “Those born as Jews may trace their lineage to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but the religious pedigree of sincere converts to Judaism derives directly from the Creator.”

Over the last 13 years I’ve been involved in ITJ, I’m seeing fewer couples take the class, but more singles. I want to add on this day which is the beginning of LGBTQIA pride weekend in Pittsburgh, that a significant number of folks who choose to become Jewisg identify as queer or trans. That’s for two reasons: first, the liberal movements in Judaism are welcoming and affirming to the LGBT community. And two, especially for the trans community, for many of them that are in the process of coming into themselves fully and taking on a new name or transitioning to a gender identity other than the one assigned at birth, they now have the freedom to explore a totally new identity, and that includes their religion. And they often chose Judaism.

You might then ask - well, demographically, will the number of born Jews that stop practicing Judaism be replaced by folks converting into Judaism? That I do not know, and I don’t think it matters. Because again, it’s about the qualitative measure of an individual person's life, and not the overall numbers. And that brings me back to our parsha, which tells us in Numbers 1 that we are to count up the numbers. And list the names.

The Meor Eynayim - Rabbi Menachem Nahum of Chernobyl , died in 1797 taught the following regarding the numbers and the names. He said:

Hashem Yitborach - our Holy God - sends out the host (angels) to count, and there can not be even one missing Aleph from among them, has veShalom, that they absolutely must always be whole.

And the end of the verse says they are called by their names - for a person’s name is their essence and soul. For the letters of one’s name are their root and their life force. And by them, one serves God, and learns, and prays.

In other words, the reason God commands Moses to write out the names of the Israelites is because each and every one of us that counts ourselves as a Jew, God records our names and does not miss even a letter of a single person, because our Hebrew name is our soul, our root and our life force - in Hebrew, shemo shel adam hu nishmato, shoresho vechiuto . If we pursue Torah we hold the secret to life.
Not everyone is going to chose Judaism. But so many people do - both folks born to Jewish parents and folks that are not. My point is: Judaism is not going anywhere. It meaningful and beautiful, and people have sought out its wisdom for thousands of years. Regardless of how many or how few choose to live a Jewish life, as long as human beings seek meaning and joy and purpose, Judaism will exist, and for the people that chose it, those born Jewish and those who come to it later, Judaism will thrive.

As we come to Shavuot and reenact Sinai, Jews get to receive Torah all over again for themselves, and take stock of what that means. And of course, our additional reading for Shavuot will be the book of Ruth, the story of a woman who finds personal meaning and common cause with the Jewish people and explains ‘your people are my people, you God is my God.’ BaMidbar - Numbers - is the parsha of demographic counting, but the texts asks us to give over our names, one by one, to God. And Shavuot is the holiday of the convert - when we all stand at sinai and get to chose Judaism again, and rediscover the secret to life. Shabbat Shalom.

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Hesped/Eulogy for my Grandmother, Rachel Baser Freisleben

Parshat Pinchas 5785 - Immigration Policy, Divorced from Morality

Conversion will help to secure the Jewish Future - BaMidbar 5785

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