The Crown Everyone Can Wear Midrash is, among other things, the ability to listen to the Torah’s silences. Sometimes they contain great dramas. What is the meaning of Abraham’s silence as he rides for three days with Isaac, toward the mountain and the great trial? Or of Isaac, as he lies bound on the altar? […]
The Hardest Word to Hear The story of Bila’am, the Pagan prophet, begins with a bewildering set of non-sequiturs – a sequence of events that seems to have no logic. First, the background. The Israelites are approaching the end of their forty years in the wilderness. Already they have fought and won wars against Sihon […]
Law and Narrative One of the most striking features of the Torah – and of the Judaic heritage generally – is insufficiently commented on, namely its combination of law and narrative. The Mosaic books contain both, and they gave rise to two different literatures in the rabbinic period, namely halakhah and aggadah. Halakhah represents law. Aggadah […]
Arguments for the Sake of Heaven The Korach rebellion was the worst of many in the wilderness years. It involved senior figures – Korach himself, a member of Moses’ tribe, together with leading Reubenites, and 250 others, “well known community leaders.” So grave was it that it became, for the sages, a paradigm of the […]
Without Walls Listen carefully to the report brought back by the spies sent by Moses to examine the promised land: They gave Moses this account, “We went into the land to which you sent us, and it does flow with milk and honey! Here is its fruit. But the people who live there are powerful, […]
Humility I find it one of the most revealing moments in Moses’ life. To understand it we must remember the context. He has just been challenged by the Israelites to provide them with meat. “If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we ate in Egypt at no cost – also the […]
The Priestly Blessings In Jerusalem, looking down on Israel’s Parliament, the Knesset, is a magnificent building, the Israel museum. It houses an extraordinary array of exhibits, drawn from almost every age, place and culture. There are items from the entire history and geography of the Diaspora. There is a large collection of idols and graven […]
The Logic of Hope One of the greatest Jewish contributions to the civilization of the West is the idea of hope. Not all cultures give rise to hope. To the contrary, at the heart of many cultures is the idea that time is cyclical. What has been, will be. History is a set of eternal […]
Real Responsibilities And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof – it shall be a jubilee unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family. (Lev. 25:10) These words, taken from this week’s sedra, […]
Counting Time The human body contains 100 trillion cells. Within each cell is a nucleus. Within each nucleus is a double copy of the human genome. Each genome contains 3.1 billion letters of genetic code, enough if transcribed to fill a library of five thousand books. Each cell, in other words, contains a blueprint of […]
