Rabbi Esther Hugenholtz

Parashat Lech Lecha 2018 Rabbi Esther Hugenholtz The God Who Sees For those of you who heard my High Holiday sermons, you may remember I might have speant a lot of time already on Parashat Lech Lecha. It was the opening words of Chapter 12 that carried us through a vision of t’shuvah and transformation for the season and that have shaped our consciousness of who Abraham and Sarah were. We hold them up to be spiritual giants, innovators, the openers of doors and the makers of souls. In the Midrashic imagination, Abraham is Judaism’s first and best missionary as he welcomes people into the Covenant with food, conversation and hospitality. In the modern imagination, he is the first activist who, unlike the passivity of Noach, doesn’t only obey God but challenges God. He is the great humanitarian who stays God’s hand for the sake of ten righteous individuals before the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah are overturned. This is the Abrahamic paradigm we love an...

Parashat Lech Lecha 2017 Rabbi Esther Hugenholtz The Abrahamic Story It is when I get to parshiyot (portions) like Lech Lecha, that I experience a mild, existential panic. There is so much to say, and so little time to say it. As a darshanit (preacher), I have to take a deep breath and tell myself: there is time. There is time to unravel the intricacies of the text; there is time to continue building a relationship with our community so that we can explore this text from its many angles, like circling a palace to find its many doors. There is time to unpick how the text speaks to us now, to acknowledge Abraham’s bold mission in its full force and to ponder how we may build upon his legacy as a Jewish community a proverbial four millennia down the line. ‘Turn in it and turn it it again and again’, Pirke Avot (Ethics of the Father) states. Our Torah is multifaceted, multilayered, textual, contextual and waiting to be ‘drashed’ by all of us...

Parashat Lech Lecha Rabbi Esther Hugenholtz A Father’s Daughter There is something Biblical about the trajectory of my late father’s life. Born in Amsterdam in 1903, in a devout Protestant family, he was the only one of five his siblings not born in Grand Rapids, Michigan (USA). Breaking with a long family tradition to train for the ministry, my father embraced science and reason and studied medicine instead. In the 1930’s my father was an ambitious young family doctor with a dream to become a psychiatrist. My father, Paul Theodoor Hugenholtz in the 1930's with his parents and siblings. He is the man labeled number 5. During the mid-to-late 1930’s, my father travelled to Germany for reasons unknown to me; perhaps they were related to his profession. Family history recounts that he had a chance to witness Adolf Hitler speak and that my father, intrigued by how such a cruel demagogue could sway so many, went to the rally. My father intellectually, morally and ide...

Parashat Lech Lecha Reform Judaism Shabbat Rabbi Esther Hugenholtz From Comfort Zone to Home ‘ Vayomer Adonai el Avram lech lecha me’artzecha u’mimoladecha u’mibeit avicha el ha’aretz asher ar’echa ’ (Gen. 12:1) – ‘And the Eternal said to Avram, go for yourself, from your land and your birthplace and your father’s house to the land I will show you.’ If we would have to compile a Top Ten of meaningful lines from the Torah that are just begging to be ‘d’rashed’, then this line would make the cut. One of the things that makes me passionate about the Torah is the sweep of its narrative arc, the ‘God’s eye view’ of the story, from Creation to the death of Moses. Even more powerful, perhaps, is not the ability to zoom out to the expanse of the universe but rather to focus on molecules of meaning that, like subatomic particles, can hold enough energy and wisdom to fuel the world entire. This first line of Lech Lecha has such density. ‘Go for yourself, from your land a...

Parashat Lech Lecha  Rabbi Esther Hugenholtz  How to Make a Jew  How do you make a Jew? This is a tried-and-true recipe that has worked fabulously well throughout the centuries, starting with Rikvah and Yitzchak. You get a Nice Jewish Boy to meet a Nice Jewish Girl under favourable circumstances and with a bit of luck and a bit of coaxing, you hope that they will fall in love, have a chuppah and produce some Nice Jewish Babies that we can all kvell over. Bonus points if you can get this Nice Jewish Couple to sign up to join your congregation and enroll their kinderlach in your cheder or religion school. Of course, the recipe can be updated a little in case a Nice Jewish Boy meets another Nice Jewish Boy. Or Nice Jewish Girl meets another Nice Jewish Girl.  Then there’s another, though less common recipe, that has worked nicely since the days of Ruth the Moabite. Nice Non-Jewish Boy or Girl might wander into your synagogue. They might be in relations...

D’var Torah written for and delivered at Leo Baeck College, London. The Dark Side of the Moon Arriving at Parashat Lech Lecha, it is tempting to focus on its beautiful and momentous opening in which Abram is commanded to go forth from his homeland. ‘Lech Lecha’ has become the paradigmatic narrative for the spiritual journey and the religious covenant. Today, however, I would propose we journey a little deeper into our parashah to one of its more obscure sections and see if we can cast light upon it. In Genesis Chapter Fifteen, after Abram has battled the four kings of Canaan and withstood a number of tribulations, the Torah tells us about the arcane ritual of the Covenant of the Pieces (‘Brit haBetarim’). After Abram’s military successes, he appears to spiral down into melancholy (or perhaps today we would call it ‘depression’) and asks God both an existential and a practical question: who will inherit if I fail to have children, “v’anochi holech ariri?“ (Gen. 15:2) This is a poignant...

There is an idea that in order for religion to remain relevant, religion should make the comfortable feel uncomfortable. The ability of Judaism to be self-aware, critical and iconoclastic is especially revealed in how the tradition shapes our ethics regarding the treatment of the stranger, the disempowered and the poor. Of course, many of us are familiar with the Torah’s insistence to treat the stranger with compassion since we were strangers in Egypt. The Exodus is often invoked as a motive for social justice, by the small and great alike, including Dr. Martin Luther King. However, there is a narrative perhaps even more powerful and certainly more unsettling than the Exodus narrative. This is the narrative of Sarah, Abraham and Hagar in B’reishit (Genesis 16). The story of Sarah, Abraham and Hagar is unsettling because it really brings home the point of what it means to be an outsider. Our own tradition confronts us with our own failings and prejudices. We are forced to re-examine the...