Senator Richard Blumenthal addresses TBE Kabbalat Shabbat service after Uvalde Massacre (Audio)

 

TBE Bar/Bat Mitzvah Commentary: Benjamin Winarsky on Bechukotai (dvar Torah, video and screen grabs)

 

Zoom Video of the Service, May 28, 2022

         Shabbat Shalom.

Thank you to everyone who came to my Bar Mitzvah today. 

In my torah portion, Bechukotai, G-d promises that if the Jews keep his commandments, they will thrive in the land of Israel. But, if the Jews do not follow them, they will suffer. G-d lists the different scenarios if the Jews follow the right path … or not. If they keep the commandments, they will get rain for crops, be evenly fed, and will win all battles. If the Jews don’t keep the commandments, they will be ruled by people they hate, lose in all battles, wild animals will steal their children and cattle, and they will be petrified from the sound of a falling leaf which will send them running in the other direction. That sounds pretty bad to me! This demonstrates that G-d gives the choice to the Jewish people and allows them to choose their destiny. Finally, this parsha says when G-d gets angry with the Jewish people and punishes them, he will never abandon them and forgive them over time. 

This portion makes me think about the choices I often have to make in life. I can follow the rules and be rewarded, (or at least not punished), or, I can break the rules and suffer the consequences. Either way, I know my parents will still love me, not abandon me, and forgive me over time. One time that I did not follow the rules was when I got lost in the woods while skiing 4 years ago. I was in Vermont with my family and another family, and I decided not to follow my dad and sister on the trail, but to follow my friends. When you are skiing, there are little pop outs where you could go off of the trail, do a jump, and keep going on your ski run. But this pop out was very different!  As we skied down there was a tree that had fallen and blocked the path. We had to unclip our skis and throw them over a tree, climb over it, and then had to keep going. Once we saw light through the trees, we thought we were fine. But when we got to the edge, there was a small cliff. Luckily, there were 2 adult snowboarders that saw three kids and decided to stop and help us. The snowboarders basically dangled us over the cliff with our skis so that we could get down.  We had been missing for a long time and our parents were skiing all over the mountain searching for us. We finally got back on a trail and my dad and sister were waiting for me.  In this scenario, I could have not gone on that pop out and followed the rules by staying on the trail. But instead, I didn’t follow the rules and basically got lost and was super scared. After what happened, my parents were annoyed that I didn’t stay on the “right track” and made them worried, but they still love me and forgave me, just like how G-d will always love and forgive the Jews even if they do not follow his rules. 

From this incident, I have come to understand that G-d wasn’t punishing the people of Israel at all, just showing them the consequences of their own actions. Just like my parents didn’t need to punish me after I skied on the wrong trail, thank you for not punishing me, I learned my lesson as a result of my own actions. Some people say the punishment fits the crime, but my portion is telling me that the punishment is the natural result of the crime. 

My mitzvah project is “Bringing Bricks to Stamford Hospital” where I will be donating Lego and Duplo sets to David’s Treasure Chest Toy Closet in the pediatric unit of Stamford Hospital. All children admitted to the hospital are able to choose a gift from the Toy Closet and I would like Legos and Duplos to be available. The reason I chose this as my project is largely based on my love of Legos. Everyone who really knows me knows that I have a passion for collecting and building with Legos. I have spent countless hours of my childhood surrounded by bricks and Lego Minifigures. I hope children at Stamford Hospital will be able to experience the same excitement and joy of building their own Lego sets as I do. If people still would like to donate a Lego or Duplo set, I will be collecting them for the next couple of weeks. 

In this Moment, May 27 - Murder-Rinse-Repeat; the Most Gruesome Verse in the Bible; "The Netanyahus" Wins a Pulitzer; The Highest and Purest Democracy

In This Moment This Shabbat-O-Gram is sponsored by Robyn and Mark Winarsky in honor of their son, Benjamin, becoming a Bar Mitzvah. Mazal tov! Shabbat Shalom With all the sadness of this week, let's begin with some of the joy on the faces of our beautiful children at last weekend's end-of-year assembly and Friday's family service. See more photos in our album, and you can also find screenshots, video and the dvar Torah from Jacob Lederman's Bar Mitzvah here. The unthinkable images coming from Uvalde, Texas deepen our resolve to protect these children, and all children, though the deck seems irredeemably stacked against us. It keeps on happening, again and again and again. There have been 27 school shootings just this year, to say nothing about the other shootings, at supermarkets, on subways, in places of worship, virtually anywhere. When Newtown happened, we thought Congress would have to act. These were kids, after all. And then Parkland...again, children. But they failed us then and there are no signs of change, even after this. Still we can't give up. Martin Luther King said, "We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope. Murder - Rinse - Repeat, and the Most Gruesome Verse in the Bible This week's Torah portion of Bechukotai contains a particularly dystopian vision of a society gone awry. It's known as the Tochecha (rebuke). The people are warned of the consequences of their neglect of the mitzvot of the Holiness Code, those laws designed to promote a just society. One of those warnings is particularly gruesome - and fitting for this week - Leviticus 26:29. Nineteenth century preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon called this verse a "blister" that most people would prefer to have been left out of the Bible. But it's there and can't be ignored. This verse, and the Tochecha as a whole, serves as a needed wake-up call at a time when we would prefer to avert our eyes and change the channel. We can't allow ourselves to do that. On the contrary, we have to take personal responsibility. The Baal Shem Tov said we should try to imagine the behavior we are rebuking as something we personally could do ourselves. He said, "If you see another person doing something ugly, meditate on the presence of that same ugliness in ourselves. And know that it is one of God’s mercies that God brought this sight before your eyes in order to remind you of that fault in you, so as to bring you back in repentance…" To be sure, we cannot really ascribe the fault of this massacre to ourselves. None of us is capable of such an incomprehensible evil. But the Baal Shem Tov isn't saying that. What he's saying is that now that we have seen the "ugliness" - and there is nothing more ugly than what we've seen in Texas in Buffalo these past few weeks - if we do nothing to stop it, THAT'S when the fault can be seen in ourselves. If we give up hope, we would have no one else to blame. This can change. We must change it. If we give in to the apparent inevitability of a next massacre, we will be complicit if and when it happens. Targum Jerusalem comments on this Leviticus verse, saying, "How evil that guilt, and how bitter those sins, which caused our ancestors in Jerusalem to eat the flesh of their sons and their daughters!" The sins were already evil, even before the cannibalism took place. So what sins could cause such an unthinkable act to become plausible? Apathy. Apathy, which is borne of dulled senses. We can't succumb to the numbing repetition. We must listen to the prophetic cry of Golden State coach Steve Kerr, and feel his outrage. We need to ritualize the grief and put it into words - and then turn those words instantly into action. No time for simple, routinized "thoughts and prayers," not only numb the senses, they paralyze us, fooling us into thinking that a few well-chosen words can substitute for action. As Rabbi Ruth Gan Kagan put it, “Biblical Hebrew is all made out of verbs…it all starts in the doing and goes back to the doing. Why isn’t there a blessing for giving tzedaka to the poor? By the time you say the blessing, the man will die of hunger… spirituality cannot just be in what you think and what you feel – it has to be invested in what you do.” At the bottom of this email, I've clipped today's Boston Globe editorial, which is a compilation of quotes from other editorials that have followed the many mass shootings we've endured over recent years. These atrocities have become so routine that the editorials literally write themselves. We've run out of original thoughts to express the outrage. We need to find those thoughts and create new words, new ways to express outrage, much as the novelist David Grossman searched for a new language in which to explain the Holocaust in his book, See Under: Love. Of that book, the New York Times reviewer wrote, "Talking about hell on earth requires a reexamination of narration itself." We need a new language to respond to a catastrophe like this week's. And we need to be jarred into action. Leviticus 26:29 arrives just in time to shock us out of our dazed stupor, to remove us from the endless loop of xeroxed massacres. Murder - Rinse - Repeat. The NRA wants us to be dulled into silence and assumes this thing will soon blow over, as it always does. The formula is tried and true; it was employed after Sandy Hook. Simply delay and obstruct, under the pretense of showing respect for the dead by "not politicizing" this tragedy - i.e., not taking constructive action. And then wait for the nation to move on to the Next Big Thing, or just expect that they will become numb to the pain. We must not be numbed. Not while the flesh of our sons and our daughters is being eaten alive. Here is a special kaddish from Ritualwell for us to recite this week, followed by a quote from Lamentations 1:16. ‌ Mazal tov to all our honorees and graduates honored at last night's Annual Meeting. Click here for the photo album. Our thanks to Aviva Maller Photography "The Netanyahus" Wins a Pulitzer In the midst of everything else that has been happening, this past week offered some very big news on the Jewish culture front. Joshua Cohen's novel, "The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family" won the Pulitzer Prize in literature. I read "The Netanyahus" last year and was grabbed by Joshua Cohen's spot-on take on the post-war fissures between American Jews and Israelis. The book is also wildly entertaining, if at times pretentious (bring your dictionary), and it imparts some important truths about Jewish identity. And now it has won the Pulitzer, putting Cohen up in the stratosphere of Roth, Bellow, Chabon and Malamud - and making this book, which was rejected by over a dozen publishers, a must-read for American Jews.  Click here for the NYT review. And listen to this podcast interview with Cohen from Ha'aretz. I've excerpted a few of my favorite passages from the book. Some are below and others have been posted on my website. Not only is this novel supremely entertaining for its depiction of the preteen Bibi as an insufferable brat, but also in its portrayal of Bibi's father's revisionist history as an important if somewhat maniacal view that should be taken seriously. His idea was that the Spanish Inquisition did not actually force Jews to convert. They hated Jews so much that they preferred to persecute them rather than convert them. It's intriguing, though few took him seriously as a scholar (Bibi somewhat rewrote his father's hagiography later on). But Cohen does at least treat the obnoxious Benzion's ideas with enough respect to challenge the American Jewish professor who hosts him. Cohen quotes "The Big Lebowski" in the Ha'aretz interview, in speaking of the elder Netanyahu, "He's not wrong, but he's still an a--hole." Here's a sampling of my favorite passages: Just about a decade prior to the autumn I’m recalling, the state of Israel was founded. In that minuscule country halfway across the globe, displaced and refugee Jews were busy reinventing themselves into a single people, united by the hatred and subjugation of contrary regimes, in a mass process of solidarity aroused by gross antagonism. Simultaneously, a kindred mass process was occurring here in America, where Jews were busy being de-invented, or uninvented, or assimilated, by democracy and market forces, intermarriage and miscegenation. Regardless of where they were and the specific nature and direction of the process, however, it remains an incontrovertible fact that nearly all the world's Jews were involved in mid century and becoming something else; and at this point of transformation, the old internal differences between them – a former citizenship and class, to say nothing of language in degree of religious observance - became for a brief moment more palpable than ever, giving one last death rattle gasp. (P.51) The history of Zionism is so difficult to recount, and all attempts evanescence into metaphysics. Socialists, communist, anarchist, Zionists – think of how many identities Jews had to assume over the course of the modern era only in order to be what they were, to be Jews again… But this time to be Jews freely… (P.81) This next passage comes from Benzion Netanyahu's guest lecture at an American college. The questions he asks are valid. What happens when Israel the dream, the myth, comes crashing back into history and becomes all-too-real? “When it came to chronicling Jewish life, what difference could there be between Rome and Greece and Babylon? Were they all just ultimately variations on Egyptian bondage, and all of their rulers essentially incarnations of the Pharaoh? Through this process of repeatedly relating the Bible to the present, history was negated; the more the stories were repeated – every weekly recurrence of the Sabbath, every annual recurrence of a holiday – the more the past was brought into the present until the present and past were essentially collapsed and each next year was rendered identical to the last, with all occurrences made contemporary. This collapsing of time in part of a certain messianic quality both to the daily lives of individual Jews and to the collective spiritual life of the Jewish people. In other words, through interpretation these preservers of God‘s word were preserved themselves. Take, for instance, Zion, a historical kingdom that in its destruction was transmuted into myths, becoming in the Diaspora a story and poetic trope that reign supreme in the Jewish imagination for millennia. The world is full of real events, real things, which have been lost in their destruction and are only remembered as having existed in written history. Because it was remembered not as written history but as interpretable story was able to exist again in actuality, with the founding of the modern state of Israel. With the establishment of Israel, the poetic was returned to the practical. This is the first example ever in human civilization in which this happened – in which a story became real; it became a real country with a real army, real essential services, real treaties and real trade pacts, real supply chains and real sewage. Now that Israel exists, however, the days of the Bible tales are finished and the true history of my people can finally begin and if any Jewish question remains to be answered it’s whether my people have the ability or appetite to tell the difference.” (P171) Any book groups looking to read a book that won the most important literary prize in America? Let me know - I'd love to discuss it. Remember that services this Friday night are at the special time of 7 PM. Beginning next week, June 3, which is our Pride Shabbat, services will be at 6 PM and, weather permitting, outdoors (or in the tent) throughout the summer. Recommended Reading Uvalde school shooting: Faith leaders offer comfort, call for reform of gun laws (RNS). Also: Jewish sources abound regarding this life-and-death issue. We can start our conversation with this source sheet, along with these passages: Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world. (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5; Yerushalmi Talmud 4:9, Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 37a)  The opposite of good is not evil; it is indifference (Elie Wiesel)  Some are guilty, but all are responsible. (Abraham Joshua Heschel)  Do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor (Lev 19:16) And this, from Rabbi David Saperstein of the Religious Action Center: Our legislators and the gun lobby want to blame everyone but themselves. The problem, they say, is mental illness. On the one hand, tautologically, mass murderers are emotionally disturbed. On the other, the compelling evidence testifies that the overwhelming percentage of those with mental illness are not violent and those who are violent are far more often a danger to themselves than to others. More compellingly, in Canada and Japan, there are people with the same mental illnesses as here in America but they don't pick up their mother's legally obtained Bushmaster and randomly shoot people. How Politics Poisoned the Evangelical Church - The movement spent 40 years at war with secular America. Now it’s at war with itself. (Atlantic) See also: How the 'apocalyptic' Southern Baptist report almost didn't happen. Also: Key takeaways from the bombshell sex abuse report by Southern Baptists (WaPo) Southern Baptist leaders for decades both ignored and covered up sex abuse allegations while claiming to have little power to address them, a shocking third-party investigation released Sunday found. The nearly 300-page report included confidential emails and memos between longtime lawyers for the 13-million member denomination and leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention’s administrative arm. The product of an eight-month probe requested by Southern Baptists at their annual meeting in Nashville in 2021, it includes several key takeaways.Southern Baptist leaders covered up sex abuse, kept secret database, report says]1. Top leaders repeatedly tried to bury sex abuse claims and lied about what they could do 2. A former SBC president was considered “credibly accused” of sexual assault 3. Unheeded warnings went on for decades 4. Leaders seemed to put concern over potential litigation over people’s safety Why Israel’s 'Hasbara Queen' Failed Miserably to Explain Shireen Abu Akleh’s Killing - By attempting to stigmatize discussion of Shireen Abu Akleh’s killing, Israel is polarizing a debate it may well lose. It is shrinking the middle ground on which moderate and liberal critics of the occupation, who support a two-state solution and generally oppose the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, stand. See also: Is Denying the Nakba Antisemitism? Some challenging questions by Peter Beinart, from his Substack column. Memorial Day was originally a day to remember war dead ("Memorial" Day...get it?), before it became an occasion for car sales, beach trips and barbecues. Maybe this year we can regain some of the deeper meaning of this special weekend.  I hope that each of us will take a moment to recall those who have made the supreme sacrifice. As I have in prior years on Memorial Day weekend, I share with you the words of Rabbi Roland Gittlesohn  in a speech delivered at the dedication of the 5th marine cemetery on Iwo Jima, in March 1945. The speech, called "The Highest and Purest Democracy," has been called one of the great battlefield sermons to come out of World War Two.  Here lie men who loved America because their ancestors generations ago helped in her founding, and other men who loved her with equal passion because they themselves or their own fathers escaped from oppression to her blessed shores. Here lie officers and men, Negroes and whites, rich men and poor . . . together. Here are Protestants, Catholics, and Jews together. Here no man prefers another because of his faith or despises him because of his color. Here there are no quotas of how many from each group are admitted or allowed. Among these men, there is no discrimination. No prejudices. No hatred. Theirs is the highest and purest democracy ... Whosoever of us lifts his hand in hate against a brother, or who thinks himself superior to those who happen to be in the minority, makes of this ceremony and the bloody sacrifice it commemorates, an empty, hollow mockery. To this, then, as our solemn duty, sacred duty do we the living now dedicate ourselves: to the right of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, of white men and Negroes alike, to enjoy the democracy for which all of them have here paid the price ...  We here solemnly swear that this shall not be in vain. Out of this and from the suffering and sorrow of those who mourn this will come, we promise, the birth of a new freedom for the sons of men everywhere. Jerusalem Day is this Sunday.  Click here for a map of the battle of Jerusalem and see video below of the historic moment when the Israeli troops liberated the Western Wall. See also a packet of historical maps, poetry and information that I prepared.  For big newspaper fans like me, this site has newspaper front pages and major stories from those fateful days in June. In this L'Chayim interview marking the war's 40th anniversary, about seven minutes in, you can see my personal reflections on how 1967 changed my life. Photos below of Israeli soldiers at the Western Wall shortly after its liberation, are from Life magazine Shabbat Shalom! Rabbi Joshua Hammerman   Below is an editorial from today's Boston Globe Temple Beth El 350 Roxbury Road Stamford, Connecticut 06902 203-322-6901 | www.tbe.org    A Conservative, Inclusive, Spiritual Community

Selections from Pulitzer Prize Winning Novel, "The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family"

I read "The Netanyahus" last year and immediately was taken by Joshua Cohen's spot on take on the growing mid-century fissure between American Jews and Israelis. Aside from that, it is hilarious.  And now it has won the Pulitzer, putting Cohen up on the level of Roth, Bellow, Chabon and Malamud - and making this book, which was rejected by over 20 publishers, a must-read for American Jews.  I've highlighted some of my favorite passages.  Click here for the NYT review. Click here for the Ha'aretz podcast interview.

A decade: the lifespan of a salamander; the time it took for the Flavian‘s to put up the Colosseum in for Odysseus to make it back to Ithaca;… Just about a decade prior to the autumn I’m recalling, the state of Israel was founded. In that minuscule country halfway across the globe, displaced and refugee Jews were busy reinventing themselves into a single people, united by the hatred and subjugation of contrary regimes, in a mass process of solidarity aroused by gross antagonism. Simultaneously, a kindred mass process was occurring here in America, where Jews were busy being de-invented , or uninvented, or assimilated, by democracy and market forces, intermarriage and miscegenation. Regardless of where they were and the specific nature and direction of the process, however, it remains an incontrovertible fact that nearly all the worlds Jews were involved in mid century and becoming something else; and at this point of transformation, the old internal differences between them – a former citizenship and class, to say nothing of language in degree of religious observance - became for a brief moment more palpable than ever, giving one last death rattle gasp. (P.51)

Dr. Netanyahu was a believer, and if there was any distinction at all between what he believed and what the rabbis did, it was that Dr. Netanyahu preferred to attribute the power of change not to a deity acting in accordance with an inscrutable design to the worlds best stock of Gentiles who acted out of hatred, constantly judging the Jews and pressing them, and affecting change through their oppression: converting them, and converting them, massacring and expelling. This is how Dr. Netanyahu was able to pass off a theology as history, by the vesting the divine of its responsibility for change and assigning it instead to mortals… (P.41)

 

The history of Zionism is so difficult to recount, and all attempts evanescence into metaphysics. Socialists, communist, anarchist, Zionists – think of how many identities Jews had to assume over the course of the modern era only in order to be what they were, to be Jews again… But this time to be Jews freely… (P.81)

 

As the Netanyahu kids are mesmerized watching their host’s brand new TV in 1960, Benjamin, sitting Leaugust said without tearing his snake-eyed gaze from the screen, that he wanted to watch Bonanza.

 Consider these stories: a band of across the border desperadoes threaten a ranch and a lone gunslinger is warily hired to dispatch them, paid a bounty with the last of a sweetheart prostitute’s dusty nuggets… A tribe of savage Apache attack a wagon train of honest Christian missionaries who must compromise with violence… I’m not saying these stories had an outside influence on the future direction of the Netanyahu boys, so much as I’m saying they had an outside influence on everyone, at the time. (P156)

Benzion Netanyahu gives a lecture toward the end of the book, detailing his take on Jewish history.

“When it came to chronicling Jewish life, what difference could there be between Rome and Greece and Babylon? Were they all just ultimately variations on Egyptian bondage, and all of their rulers essentially incarnations of the Pharaoh? Through this process of repeatedly relating the Bible to the present, history was negated; the more the stories were repeated – every weekly recurrence of the Sabbath, every annual recurrence of a holiday – the more the past was brought into the present until the present and past were essentially collapsed and each next year was rendered identical to the last, with all occurrences made contemporary.  This collapsing of time in part of a certain messianic quality both to the daily lives of individual Jews and to the collective spiritual life of the Jewish people. In other words, through interpretation these preservers of God‘s word were preserved themselves. Take, for instance, Zion, a historical kingdom that in its destruction was transmuted into myths, becoming in the Diaspora a story and poetic trope that reign supreme in the Jewish imagination for millennia.  The world is full of real events, real things, which have been lost in their destruction and are only remembered as having existed in written history. Because it was remembered not as written history but as interpretable story was able to exist again in actuality, with the founding of the modern state of Israel. With the establishment of Israel, the poetic was returned to the practical. This is the first example ever in human civilization in which this happened – in which a story became real; it became a real country with a real army, real essential services, real treaties and real trade pacts, real supply chains  and real sewage. Now that Israel exists, however, the days of the Bible tales are finished and the true history of my people can finally begin and if any Jewish question remains to be answered it’s whether my people have the ability or appetite to tell the difference.” (P171)

 

You, Ruben Blum, are out of history; you’re over and finished; and only a generation or to the memory of who your people were will be dead, and America won’t give your unrecognizable descendants anything real with which to replace the sense of peoplehood it took from them; cut…. Your life here is rich in possessions but poor in spirit, petty and forgivable, with your Frigidaires and color TVs, in front of which you can munch your instant supper, laugh at the joke, and choke, realizing that you have traded your birth right away for a bowl of plastic lentils… (P212)

TBE Bar/Bat Mitzvah Commentary: Jacob Lederman on Behar, plus video and screen grabs

 

Screen Grabs from the services 

Shabbat Shalom! 

My portion of Behar includes the idea of the Sabbatical or Shmita year, which is a time of rest for the workers and for the land itself.  Just as with the Shabbat day every week, the Torah feels that it’s important to be able to take a break to renew our energy. 

But… there was one person who never took a day off… at least before his retirement, who even wrote a book called “Relentless.”  And he is my hero – in fact, he is my Jewish hero. And it doesn’t hurt that I’m also a Patriots fan – as he was a career Patriot.

Julian Edelman never took a day off until he retired due to a knee injury.  He has taught us that even someone relentless also needs to rest, just like the land of Israel, and everyone else on this planet except for one person… Tom Brady, who will never go away. It’s time to retire, Tom! 

I met Edelman once. I went to one of his football camps. He treated us so well, like he knew everyone forever. I played catch, I got his autograph and took a few pictures. It will be a day I remember forever.

I admire him because we have a lot of similarities.  We’re built about the same, not so big, not naturally athletic, and Football is something we’ve both had to work hard at. Like him, I play wide receiver, and like him, I’ve played quarterback too.  We’ve also faced some similar challenges off the field, like coming to grips with our Jewish identity.

In his book “Relentless,” he teaches how to overcome challenges and be the best “me.”  For Edelman, being Jewish has become a major part of his life, and a part of his best “me.” 

Edelman tweets about his Jewish journey often, he has worn an Israeli flag pin on the field, gone on a Birthright-style trip to Israel, and he has written a children’s book that includes a reference to Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism. He makes himself available to other athletes and educates them on Judaism and antisemitism. In March 2021, Edelman reached out to Miami Heat player Meyers Leonard after he used an antisemitic slur during a livestream video. In my Torah portion it states that we should not oppress our neighbor – it says this twice, therefore commentators determined that one time it means not to oppress our neighbor with words, which relates to this situation. This is the lesson he taught Meyers Leonard. Edelman took things one step further and introduced Leonard to Judaism by inviting him to Shabbat dinner, something my parents   have done often inviting my friends over for Shabbat and holidays. Edelman also did the same for wide receiver Deshawn Jackson when he used an anti-Semitic quote.

When it comes to being proud of his Jewish faith Edelman never takes a Sabbatical. In fact, on the day he retired, he released a video announcing his retirement while wearing a star of David.  Furthermore, after the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in 2018 that killed 11 people, Edelman wore special cleats with Hebrew literature on them to honor the victims. He also continued to tweet: “My heart is broken for the families in Pittsburgh. It’s hard to even imagine such senselessness. As a Jew, an American and a human, I’m devastated.”

Edelman is also now studying to become bar mitzvah.  So, I could possibly give back to him, and inspire him to complete this tall task.

Just like Edelman, I like to pay it forward, and help those less fortunate.  For my Mitzvah Project, I collected cleaning supplies for the Open Door Shelter in my hometown of Norwalk. The Open Door Shelter helps homeless families move into new homes. The cleaning kits I collected are given to every family so they have basic cleaning supplies to start off with. I did this because it is something that I see in my everyday life, as my mom has taught me and my brother how important it is to keep a house clean.