Rabbi Esther Hugenholtz

Parashat Shemot 2018 Rabbi Esther Hugenholtz Open Heart Surgery There is a curious, little-known prayer called the ‘Havineinu’, meaning ‘grant us understanding’. Havineinu is a condensed version of the weekday Amidah. Instead of the usual thirteen middle blessings, the Havineinu offers a shortcut for extenuating circumstances. One of the lines of this prayer that stood out to me was ‘ l’da’at derachecha umol et levavenu liratecha ’ – ‘that we may know Your ways; open our hearts to revere You.’   At least, that’s the slightly parve translation Siddur Sim Shalom gives us. Instead, we could translate it as ‘that we may know Your ways; circumcise our hearts to fear You.’ A little more intense, nu ? Circumcision of the heart is a frequently recurring trope in the Hebrew Bible; from the Torah (Deut. 30:6) all the way through the Prophetic literature (Ezekiel 36:26). It always refers to an internalized, emotional process of contritely drawing closer to God and se...

Parashat Shemot Rabbi Esther Hugenholtz The Revolutionary Road to Marriage There’s a game a friend and I used to play in rabbinical school. It was called: ‘open the Torah in two random places and then create a connecting ‘ d’rash ’ between the two texts’. Clearly, this is evidence of seminarians’ nerdiness but this ‘midrash making’ has ancient Jewish precedence. Our Rabbinic tradition is brimming with connecting interpretations to squeeze even more meaning out of the terse words of our Torah. Today I am going to reinvent that game in a slightly different guise. It’s called ‘how do you tie a random parashah in with an upcoming simcha?’ Today, Simon Marcus and Becky Teiger are celebrating their recent engagement to be married with our community: a community they are so dedicated in building up through their myriad of volunteer (over?) commitments. Our community is as strong as the members who build it and it is important for us to celebrate all the contributions, large or ...

Rabbi Esther Hugenholtz  Parashat Shemot,  December 2013  The Hebrew Midwives  What’s the oldest profession in the book? The answer is: midwifery. One thing we know for sure is that babies have always been born and mothers have always needed guidance through this momentous process. We can only imagine what midwifery must have looked like during the shadowy beginnings of civilization: a case of trial-and-error, where experience weighed heavier than empiricism. Women simply helped, held, comforted and assisted labouring women, during a moment in their lives fraught with death and danger as well as joy and triumph.  To be a midwife is to be a priestess of the body, guiding a process that is deeply mysterious and utterly mundane at once. Yet birth is never to be taken for granted as we search for words to speak about childbirth respectfully, sensitively and honestly. Like all existential matters, it is hard for a young rabbi like myself to find the...