Oh god, this reminds me of this shabbaton I was at one time. It was supposed to be a “unity” shabbaton, where we talked about the different movements of Judaism and came away with nice fuzzy feelings, but apparently no one thought about checking the parsha when planning the dates because…I can’t remember exactly what it was, but it was all about how to punish people for misdeeds…for what crimes people should be stoned to death, that sort of thing. It was hysterical to watch the poor people who had ended up with the task of saying a dvar torah try to find nice messages about unity in this.
(Okay, okay. The Torah is split up into 51…I think it’s 51…sections. Each is called a parsha and you’re supposed to read one a week. I forget when the missing week is made up, maybe at Yom Kippur? Anyway, at services the rabbi or maybe someone else will do a dvar torah, a word of the Torah, and talk about the parsha of the week in depth. It was just a particularly bad parsha for the event.)