Rabbi Noam Raucher, MA.Ed – Executive Director, FJMC International This week’s Torah reading, Matot, opens with a sentence that sounds simple until you try to live by it: “If a man makes a vow to God or takes an oath imposing an obligation on himself, he shall not break his pledge; he must carry out all that has …
Rabbi Noam Raucher, MA.Ed – Executive Director, FJMC International There is a brutal sequence in Chukat that is easy to miss because the story moves so quickly. And since June is Men’s mental health awareness month, we should pause and read the story closely. Miriam dies. The people have no water. They complain to Moses …
Rabbi Noam Raucher, MA.Ed – Executive Director, FJMC International Our ancestors are standing at the edge of possibility. They have been freed from Egypt. They have received Torah at Sinai. They have been shaped, however imperfectly, into a people. Now, in parashat Sh’lach, they are close enough to the Promised Land to imagine actually entering it. Moses sends twelve …
Rabbi Noam Raucher, MA.Ed – Executive Director, FJMC International When I became a father for the first time, like many men, I had no idea what I was doing. Short of helping create an actual human being, I had no real understanding of how to care for that life. I relied on instinct, love, anxiety, …
Rabbi Noam Raucher, MA.Ed – Executive Director, FJMC Parashat Naso contains one of the most difficult passages in the Torah: the ritual of the Sotah, the woman suspected of adultery. There is no way to make this text easy. A husband is overcome by jealousy. He suspects his wife of betrayal. The matter is brought …
Rabbi Noam Raucher, MA.Ed — Executive Director, FJMC International The Torah’s account of Sinai is not gentle. Neither is my account of growing into manhood. Much like our ancestors’ experience receiving the Torah eons ago, my experience receiving the Torah contained in masculinity was filled with confusion, awe, fear, trembling and pressure. That’s not to …
Rabbi Noam Raucher, MA.Ed — Executive Director, FJMC International The Book of Numbers begins, unsurprisingly, by counting. At the opening of Bamidbar (lit. In the wilderness), God tells Moses to take a census of the Israelites: tribe by tribe, household by household, name by name. It is easy to read the moment as administrative. A nation in …
Rabbi Noam Raucher, MA.Ed — Executive Director, FJMC International Men are often taught to treat money as proof of manhood. Not just as a practical necessity. As evidence. Evidence that you are competent, desirable, serious, protective, respectable. Evidence that you can provide, recover, endure. Evidence that your life is moving forward. And if that evidence …
Rabbi Noam Raucher, MA.Ed — Executive Director, FJMC International Shlomo Bardin, the visionary founder of Brandeis-Bardin, famously taught that Judaism is “caught, not taught.” He was right, and also only half right. Judaism is contagious. It travels through melody, gesture, hospitality, rhythm, meals, posture, atmosphere. It gets into a person through the body before it …
Rabbi Noam Raucher, MA.Ed — Executive Director, FJMC International Grief is one of the places where masculinity most often betrays men. Not because men do not feel deeply. They do. But many men are trained to metabolize loss through motion rather than mourning. Keep working. Keep producing. Keep carrying. Keep the face composed and the …
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