Bamidbar
Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch on Parashat Bamidbar, read on Shabbat Bamidbar · The year closes; the next begins — with one of this week's three questions for the two of you.
A year ago, on Erev Shavuot, we opened with Hirsch's eighth letter — Israel as a kingdom of priests, the home as the original sanctuary. We close the year by going back to Hirsch's first letter, the very beginning of the Nineteen Letters. There, a young man named Benjamin writes to his friend Naphtali asking the question that runs underneath the whole book: Does Judaism speak to a thinking modern person? Does it enlarge me, or shrink me? Can I live a Jewish life and still be fully alive in the world? A year ago that question was abstract. After fifty-one Friday-night conversations, the answer is no longer something you read about. It lives, specifically, in the texture of how the two of you have come to speak to each other across this table. The answer to Benjamin's question, after a year, is your marriage.
A year ago, what did you most hope this practice would do for us? Looking back — what did it actually do?
The full week — the passage itself with its source, the other two questions, and the closing verse of hope — lives in the app. Together Tomorrow on the App Store.