Shabbat Shalom GRJC
Weekly Emails to the Congregation
Parshat Ki Tetze 2007
Shabbat Shalom to the GRJC family,
Tonight, we light candles at 7:24 PM.
Friday night services will begin at 8 PM and Saturday morning
services will begin at 9 AM.
We read this week from parshat Ki Tetze in the Book of Devarim
(Deuteronomy). At the end of this week’s reading, we come
back to a passage that we read as a special reading before Purim.
It is the passage that tells us about Amalek, the nomadic people
that attacked the Israelites in the desert. It was a
ruthless attack in which the Amalekites attacked the Israelites
when they were “famished and weary” and they “cut down all the
stragglers.”
When the Israelites wandered in the desert, there were nations who
did not permit the Israelites to travel through their lands.
The Israelites then had to choose other paths for their journey.
What is interesting here from a religious point of view is that in
some cases God comes out and fights other nations on behalf of the
Israelites. God destroys the Egyptian army as it pursues the
Israelites through the Sea of Reeds. In the days of Samson,
God gives him strength to crush the power of the Philistines.
However, it seems that in the case of Amalek, the enemy was able
to advance on us and overtake us, or at least part of the
Israelite multitude. What this episode points to is the
reality that in the Torah, God does not always stand before us as
a shield to all difficult situations. Sometimes human beings
in the Torah act as shields for the people. Moses and
others “Stand in the breach” and mediate between the people and
God and between the Israelites and others. We see, then,
that we live our lives in partnership with God in a world that is
often hostile and unforgiving. With the ethical principles
of the Torah, with the compassion that the Torah demands from us
to show to others, we take God’s teachings and we try to share
them and teach them, to make them the modus vivendi for our world.
And this Shabbat, I hope we are all able to find some rest,
rejuvenation, and peace as we enjoy “God’s day off.”
With blessings,
Rabbi Tow
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