Ideas rooted
in community

This week’s parsha, Emor, includes the Torah’s instructions for the holiday of Sukkot: “In booths you shall dwell seven days.” On the surface, this is a very physical commandment.

A few months back, we captured something beautiful on video: the voices of Harlem Service Corps alumni reflecting on what this experience has meant in their lives.

Parshat Kedoshim opens with a famous instruction: “Speak to the whole Israelite community” — kol adat b’nei Yisrael — “and say to them: You shall be holy, for I, Hashem your God, am holy.”

Dimitry here. Below is a personal story, but first I want to share a word about this moment. Today is Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, which marks the greatest calamity to befall the Jewish people since the Roman conquest of Judea.

Jewish tradition sometimes invites a plain kind of honesty about our circumstances when we are awash in uncertainty..

On the 8th day of consecrating the Mishkan in the desert, Moses and Aaron make a final set of offerings to God and then…they wait.

Last night, our Harlem Service Corps spent the evening walking Harlem together on one of the group’s semi-regular tours led by John Reddick, the group's co-facilitator.

In describing the chatat, the sin offering, the Torah points to what at first seems like a banal distinction: if the meat of the offering is cooked in an earthenware vessel, that vessel must be shattered afterward.

Passover is never just a meal. It is a stage, a classroom, a sanctuary, a provocation. It is where questions rise, where children lean in, where stories deepen, and the where journey from constriction to possibility begins again.

Vayikra reminds us that a meaningful life begins when we learn to listen for the places where love and responsibility meet.