According to Professor Deborah Lipstadt, recent author of Antisemitism: Here and Now, the way to fight antisemitism isn’t to focus on the threat — isn’t to hide in the face of danger — but instead to show the haters that we are Jews. It is incumbent on us to know who we are and to be proud of what we stand for: even if — especially because — it is different than what most people do; whether this means observing times of rest and special ways to eat, or fighting for the rights of the stranger, because we were strangers.
Read MoreOn Simchat Torah, we read the end and the beginning of the Torah in one breath, so to speak – as one unbroken story. This leads scholar and poet Esther Schor to argue that “the creation of the world is God’s shiva for Moses.” For seven days, God holds God’s breath – carries inside of Godself Moses’ life force, until finally God forms the first human from earth, blows into this its nostrils the breath of life God took from Moses: the last breath Moses breathes out thus becomes Adam’s first.
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