Category: Jewish World

The kruvim, three-dimensional depictions of two winged childlike beings, a male and female, formed from the gold of the kappores, the cover of the aron, are described as “facing one another” (Shemos 37:9). The...

Our ancestors’ devotion, so soon after the revelation at Har Sinai, to a physical object, the egel hazahav, the golden calf, is rightly and remarkably confounding. Obviously, like so many of the Torah’s narratives,...

Last year, I noted what Rav Avdimi bar Chama bar Chasa says about the Sinaitic revelation, that “Hashem overturned the mountain above the Jews like a barrel [gigis] and said to them: ‘If you...

Eretz Yisrael is the desideratum to which the Torah’s entire narrative leads. From Hashem’s promising the Land to Avraham’s descendants, to our ancestors’ exodus from Mitzrayim and years of wandering in the desert, the...

Should you ever happen to find yourself in an ornate, high-ceilinged room and a military-uniformed string ensemble is segueing from a flawless rendition of a Bach Concerto to an equally impressive (if considerably less...

He refused. That is the meaning of the word vayima’en, a word used twice in the story of Yosef in this parsha, once to describe a refusal by Yaakov Avinu, the second to describe...

  It is said in the name of the Vilna Gaon that the essential meaning of any given Hebrew word lies in the word’s first appearance in the Torah. A traditional hope declared by...