This week's parasha features one of my favorite scenes in all of Torah.
Wrestling with G-d, Jacob earns the name Israel. And this shabbat we continue Kadima’s wrestling with Israel.
Jacob wrestled in the darkness. At dawn, the encounter ended. But we will wrestle in the daylight. Rabbi Brant Rosen named his book this way, going public with his many years of growth, questioning, and yes, wrestling, toward Palestinian solidarity.
Kadima’s history and evolution of wrestling with Israel dates back to before its founding and has existed in every generation of Kadima leadership, staff, youth, and adults. Without attachment to any outcome, tomorrow, auspiciously aligning with this parasha of Jacob’s wrestling and being renamed Israel, we continue this tradition beginning a three-session pilot to model our personal and communal wrestling with our relationship with Israel. To wrestle is to win. In fact, the name Israel has been often translated as “wrestling with G-d,” but in fact, it more closely means “to persist/persevere with G-d.”
Thus, let us begin our public questioning in the first installment of Defining Ourselves: Zionism & Anti-Zionism appreciating our first four storytellers who will split the seas that block our way to liberation, beginning tomorrow morning.
And in doing so, we do not seek one side or the other to “win” – we seek a persistence, a perseverance with one another. An everlasting commitment to and ongoing engagement with one another.
I am grateful to be in a community willing to have these conversations not in the dark of night, but in the daylight. Shkoyach. Hazak u’varcuh. Thank you and may we have strength and blessing in our engagement.
Shabbat shalom,
R’ David
Wrestling with G-d, Jacob earns the name Israel. And this shabbat we continue Kadima’s wrestling with Israel.
Jacob wrestled in the darkness. At dawn, the encounter ended. But we will wrestle in the daylight. Rabbi Brant Rosen named his book this way, going public with his many years of growth, questioning, and yes, wrestling, toward Palestinian solidarity.
Kadima’s history and evolution of wrestling with Israel dates back to before its founding and has existed in every generation of Kadima leadership, staff, youth, and adults. Without attachment to any outcome, tomorrow, auspiciously aligning with this parasha of Jacob’s wrestling and being renamed Israel, we continue this tradition beginning a three-session pilot to model our personal and communal wrestling with our relationship with Israel. To wrestle is to win. In fact, the name Israel has been often translated as “wrestling with G-d,” but in fact, it more closely means “to persist/persevere with G-d.”
Thus, let us begin our public questioning in the first installment of Defining Ourselves: Zionism & Anti-Zionism appreciating our first four storytellers who will split the seas that block our way to liberation, beginning tomorrow morning.
And in doing so, we do not seek one side or the other to “win” – we seek a persistence, a perseverance with one another. An everlasting commitment to and ongoing engagement with one another.
I am grateful to be in a community willing to have these conversations not in the dark of night, but in the daylight. Shkoyach. Hazak u’varcuh. Thank you and may we have strength and blessing in our engagement.
Shabbat shalom,
R’ David
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