Finding the Joy

Leviticus calls the grain offering a "soul." Rashi says it's what a poor person brings. God counts it as everything.

After the Golden Calf, the first repair isn't a speech — it's a gathering. What a shul losing half its staff and Team Israel in Miami have in common.

The tablets broke. God said: carve new ones. This Shushan Purim, Jerusalem read the Megillah under Iranian missiles — and danced.

The Torah's first instruction for the eternal light: the olives had to be crushed. This week, anemones bloom again in fields along the Gaza border.

God handed Moses a procurement list for the Tabernacle — down to the dye colors. Then: everyone whose heart is so moved.

There is a man in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, right now — a Jewish attorney from South Florida named Jared Firestone — hurtling face-first down an ice track on a sled the size of a cafeteria tray. He is representing Israel in skeleton at the Winter Olympics. He finished twenty-second out of twenty-four competitors. He is thrilled. Last week, at the opening ceremony in Milan, Firestone carried the Israeli flag while wearing a kippah embroidered with the names of the eleven Israe

The parsha with the Ten Commandments is named for a Midianite priest. A lot of people heard what God did. Yitro moved.

The women packed drums before they left Egypt. Before the sea split. Before there was any reason to sing. Rashi wants to know where the timbrels came from.

There is a falafel stand at Mahane Yehuda market in Jerusalem that changed a man's life. Not because the falafel was extraordinary — though if you've been to Mahane Yehuda, you know it might have been. But because of what he saw when the fried chickpea balls came out of the oil. Round. Golden-brown. Warm. David "Dugo" Leitner was fourteen years old in January 1945 when the Nazis marched him out of Auschwitz. Starving, freezing, wearing camp clothes in the Polish snow, he drea

God made four promises of redemption. Nobody was ready to hear them. He started anyway.

Israelis chose "homeward" as their word of the year. Moses named his son "stranger in a foreign land." The parsha that starts Exodus moves in one direction.

The parsha about Jacob's death is named "And He Lived." Somewhere along the Gaza fence, a rubber duck is squeaking. Both things are true at once.

Joseph told his brothers: come forward to me. The whole parsha runs on that verb. This week in Israel, we came.

Joseph's brothers saw an Egyptian official. The Greeks saw a provincial temple. Sometimes the miracle is right in front of you, hidden in plain sight.

The parsha called "And He Settled" is the one where everything falls apart. The dwelling was never in the walls.

Jacob wrestled all night and walked into dawn with a new name and a limp. Both were permanent. Names don't describe who you are — they describe who you're becoming.

Leah named her son Yehuda — "I will give thanks." That name became Jew. We are the people named for thank you.

Isaac dug his father's wells, gave them the same names, and kept digging when people filled them in. The quietest patriarch has the most to teach.

A parsha called "The Life of Sarah" opens with her death. Everything that follows — the land, the bride, the comfort — is the life.

Sarah laughed twice in Genesis. Once in disbelief, once holding her son. She named him for the distance between the two.