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Tag Archives: ritual

Will you take your rightful place?

11 Wednesday Oct 2017

Posted by dinabrawer in Jewish Festival

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Tags

dancing, religion, ritual, sefer torah, Torah, women

simchat torah.png

Simchat Torah.

Will you step forward to dance with the Torah?

Will you remain content watching from the side-lines?  

Will you self-consciously say  ‘thank you I’m ok’ when invited you  to join the dance circle or hold the Torah?

The Torah reading for Simchat Torah begins with Vezot ha-Bracha followed by Bereshit.

Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh Leib of Gur (1847–1905) notes that the letterbet of Bereshit symbolizes Bracha, blessing, and so the Torah begins with blessing and concludes with blessing in Vezoht ha- Bracha, pointing to its essence: blessing.

God bestows the blessing as the ‘noten hatorah’ and the Jewish people in turn are a vessel to hold the blessing. This is what happens on Simchat Torah.

On a personal level, by putting our arms around the Torah, we turn ourselves into a container that holds it, both physically and spiritually.  

On a communal level, as we join hands to form a dance circle, we unite create a larger container of love around the Torah.

In this way we turn the mystical words of The Zohar into reality:

Kudsha Beri-hu, veOrayta veYisrael chad

The Holy One, the Torah and the People of Israel are one.

Simchat Torah is an urgent invitation to enact this unity.

Will you take your rightful place?

 

 

Playing on Purity

31 Sunday Jan 2016

Posted by dinabrawer in Media, Uncategorized

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anorexia, BBC, body, body & soul, body-image, chastity, clean-living, faith, Orthodox Judaism, purity, religion, ritual, Torah, women

Last Wednesday night, instead of tuning into one of my long-distance classes at Yeshivat Maharat, I joined BBC Radio DJ and host Lauren Laverne for Late Night Woman’s Hour.

In a relaxed round table format we discussed what ‘purity’ means for women in the context of food, sex, religion and thought.  Emma Woolf, who chronicled her experience of anorexia in her book ‘An Apple a Day’ spoke about the current obsession for purity in food, Shirley Yanez explained why she took a vow of chastity after a near death experience, and pundit Helen Lewis addressed the subject in the context of political ideas.

My contribution – the religious perspective on purity – was substantially shaped by a recent series of ‘Pastoral Torah’ classes at Yeshivat Maharat that focused on embodied spirituality. Click on the image below to listen to the program:

Screen Shot 2016-01-31 at 14.41.40

 

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