This week's Torah portion, T'tzaveh, speaks to both the beauty and the limits of the priestly framework. This portion is all about kohanim (priests), their tasks, their robes, and their consecration.
We often encounter paradoxes in life, things that appear to be mutually incompatible. Paradoxes sometimes appear in the unlikeliest places, and they deserve our close attention, like the one hiding in this week's parashah.
Brazilian nun and ecofeminist Ivone Gebara writes from the frontlines of climate and economic disaster. Attuned to the plurality of pains crying out locally and echoing across the globe, Gebara weaves together a theology of ecosystem and interconnection, one that recognizes the vast webs of relationship binding all life in shared fate. Gebara offers a vision for human and ecological flourishing that starts with an honest account of communal and environmental degradation.
In the second century, Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai and Rabbi Eliezer, son of Rabbi Yosei, traveled from the Galilee to Rome to plead for the repeal of a royal edict forbidding Shabbat, circumcision, and the laws of ritual purity.
Torah Commentary
Projecting Purpose and Building Belonging with Clothes
Pursuing Holiness
Splitting like a Fig
Parshat T'tzaveh: A Theology of Sacred Ecosystems and Interconnection
What is Holy to God? Each of Us
In the second century, Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai and Rabbi Eliezer, son of Rabbi Yosei, traveled from the Galilee to Rome to plead for the repeal of a royal edict forbidding Shabbat, circumcision, and the laws of ritual purity.