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✡︎ Shalom and Good Shabbos, Friends ✡︎
We have so much news this week to share with you, but first a few comments on this week's Torah portion, Vayishlach, Bereishit (Genesis) 32:4–36:43. This is when our matriarch, Rachel, while traveling with her husband back to Canaan, succumbs soon after giving birth to her second child, Benyamin. Rachel suffers the guilt and shame of infertility over many years. Eventually, she conceives and bears first Joseph and then Benyamin, both of whom play a very important role in the history of the Jewish people. We can be thankful that she lived in a time before attempts were made to dismember fully grown breech birth infants to save a mother's life, a brutal, primitive procedure sure to kill both mother and baby. Let us pause a moment to lament today's fatalities, the mothers who die from abortion and the babies whose lives are brutally ended by late term dismemberment and/or lethal injection, partial birth abortion, or kept alive for organ harvesting sales to the highest bidder. We must continue to call attention to this indefensible attack on innocent life until it ends.
We title our healing program, Tikvat Rachel, Hope for all Rachel's children, both born and unborn, after our matriarch, Rachel, who grieves for her progeny lost to assimilation and exile from God. In the words of Jeremiah, (31:14-16) many years later, “A voice is heard on high, lamentation, bitter weeping, Rachel weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, for they are not.” And G‑d replies to her: “Restrain your voice from weeping and your eyes from tears . . . and they shall come back from the land of the enemy. And there is hope for your future . . . and the children shall return to their own border.”
12 Facts Every Jew Should Know About Rachel
https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/4917769/jewish/12-Facts-Every-Jew-Should-Know-About-Rachel.htm
12 Facts About Benjamin Everyone Should Know
https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/5305368/jewish/12-Facts-About-Benjamin-Everyone-Should-Know.htm
Happy Chanukah and much gratitude to all who donate, subscribe and share our work. We truly appreciate your encouragement and support.
Cecily
May there be abundant peace from Heaven, and good life upon us and upon all Israel. Amen.
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