This week's parsha

Unless otherwise noted, "This week's Parsha" comprises articles taken from contributors to the Chabad.org website. We show the original author's name here, so that proper attribution is given. For the sake of brevity, footnotes cited in the original author's writings are omitted from this website. If you need to see the citations, please refer to the original articles on the Chabad.org website.

Is My Body Mine?

Published: 29 August 2011 | Written by Tali Loewenthal

The idea that "my body belongs to me" has been an important factor in making modern life more secular and libertine. "My body belongs to me," some people say, "and therefore I can do what I like with it, as long as I do not harm other people." It sounds logical enough. We live with our bodies all the time. We can understand that there should be rules about what we do to other people. But my body is "me", so why should anyone else care? Why should the Torah care? Why should the Torah give rules for how I treat my own body?

In fact, many of the rules and teachings of the Torah are precisely about our own bodies. The laws of kosher concern what kind of food we feed to our bodies. There are special blessings to be said before and after eating. There are laws and ideals of modesty and of personal morality. There are laws against physically damaging our bodies. There is even a law against tattooing.

You are what you eat

Published: 24 August 2011 | Written by Mordechai Wollenberg

This week's Torah reading mentions the kosher dietary laws. The kosher laws describe to us which animals, birds and fish we may consume and which we may not consume. They are a mainstay of Jewish communal and personal life. I would venture to suggest that a vast majority of Jews in the world today observe some degree of kashrut (adherence to kosher laws).

Nothing in the Torah is just random -- the fact that the kosher laws lay out specific requirements means that we can learn different ideas from these laws.

Dynamic Judaism

Published: 16 August 2011 | Written by Tali Loewenthal

There are static systems and dynamic systems. The static system is likely to have a strong and stable structure. But because - by definition - it does not change, after a time, it may well start to decay and even to crumble. By contrast, a dynamic system is one of movement, change and discovery.

If you were evaluating a business set up, you might ask yourself, "Static? Or dynamic?" This might affect your decision whether or not to join the firm as a director, or, if you were a banker, whether or not to lend it money. You might think in the same way about a community: "Static? Or dynamic?" Is there an atmosphere of healthy dynamism, of spirit, of excitement? Or is it staid and rather boring, and young people are moving away?

Now, the same question can be asked about a person's Jewish life. We can be in a static mode, unmoving. We are in a particular pigeonhole: we keep this, but we do not keep that. Certain Jewish things we do, quite regularly; other Jewish things we don't do. Anyway, we might say, we never did do them, so why should we start now? Those things don't matter anyway, they are only minor issues.