I’ve set two goals for myself in writing this year’s series of “Person in the Parsha” columns. One is to focus on a person who is barely mentioned in the parsha, as I’ve done in previous weeks with Nimrod. The other is to discuss the parameters of “Good” vs. “Evil,” as exemplified by the courage of the very young Avram vs. the murderous tyranny of King Nimrod.
It may not have been the first day I reported to my new job, but it was not many days later that I first met Richard Hood. I had joined a team of new PhDs, some trained as psychologists and some as educators, whose assignment it was to breathe new life into a very old-fashioned, one might even say backward, school system in suburban Washington, D.C.
I read the story quite some time ago. It was told by a young woman who boarded an airplane early one winter Friday morning. She was on her way to Chicago from New York to spend a weekend there with friends.
I read the story quite some time ago. It was told by a young woman who boarded an airplane early one winter Friday morning. She was on her way to Chicago from New York to spend a weekend there with friends.
I arrived quite early to the fourth session of the weekly class, in which we were using the book of Genesis as a source for studying leadership.
I was several minutes late for the class, and all three students, Richard, Simon, and Leon, were present and already involved in what seemed to be quite a heated discussion. Simon, usually the most reticent of the three, was the one who was talking the most.
He was an old man, frail, tired, and bereaved. News of Hitler's advancing army preoccupied him, and he was overwhelmed, if not broken, by the requests for advice he was receiving from hundreds of troubled Jews. Indeed, he may have already sensed that he had only months to live.