By Rabbi Abraham Unger, Ph.D.

Executive Director

This Week’s Torah Portion

Marking Time

One of the most critical skills in life now goes by the name “executive functioning.” In plain language, this means staying organized. At the heart of this skill is time management. After all, time is the most precious resource of all. It can never be recaptured. How we use it makes all the difference in the world.

It is therefore no surprise that the Torah states in no uncertain terms that the foundational law of the Jewish people is the marking of Rosh Chodesh, the first of each new month. It is mentioned in this week’s parsha as the very first commandment given to the Children of Israel as a nation.

The Torah doesn’t start its list of commandments with grandiose theological axioms such as the Oneness of G-d or observance of the Sabbath. It starts with the calendar. Why such an emphasis on time for this newly emergent Jewish nation? Because, as Rashi delineates, we must know the order of the annual cycle of the months of the year. How else do we know when the holidays fall, or when other significant dates on the calendar arrive? The Talmud’s laws of taxation and tithing, for example, heavily rely on knowing the sequence of the months of the year.

Rabbi Dr. Joseph Soloveitchik made the point that Judaism is a human-centered tradition. Its laws have been instituted with deep sensitivity towards the fragility of the human condition. We are born into time, but we often do not know what to do with it. The Torah is helping us here to structure our days and months into arcs of activity, organizing and building a communal life in which we mark time together, in support of our shared dreams and aspirations. After all, each Rosh Chodesh is considered a time of renewal in Jewish law. Marking time is not just about counting, it is a spiritual practice.

Weekly Parenting Message from the Parsha

Who We Are

In this week’s Shabbat Torah portion, we read of the very first Passover celebration. It was unlike any other Passover observed at any time throughout history. Why? Because it was kept while the Jews were still enslaved in Egypt! G-d commands them to have a Seder even before the plagues are finished and they are liberated. This seems to be a quixotic approach to life.

In the face of misery, the Children of Israel retain their fundamental humanity. They recall their innate freedom as human beings with an intrinsic dignity.

The psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Dr. Victor Frankl made it his life’s work to remind us that we are as we perceive ourselves. Even in the darkest depths of Auschwitz, he stated unequivocally that one’s personhood relied on his or her own sense of meaning in their lives. No taskmaster could ever take away an individual’s humanity so long as he or she still retained it, no matter the circumstance.

The lesson of that first Passover, with children surely seated around that Seder table just as they would be today, is that we define who we are. It doesn’t matter what others may think or say. Our dignity and human potential are ours forever.