Ki Savo – Discarding Despondence
The horrors of the tochacha, the parsha’s description of what Klal Yisrael will endure should it drift from heeding the Torah, left our ancestors dejected. As Rashi writes at the beginning of parshas Nitzavim...
Category: Religion
Imagining My Unmet Grandfather’s Last Thoughts: A Grandparents Day Musing
Dark-eyed, long-bearded and posing in rabbinic cap and garb, my maternal grandfather looks down at me from within his cherry-wood frame over the desk where I write. We never met; he died 16 years...
Ki Seitzei – Principal Parenting Pitfall
A rather stark contradiction seems to lie in how Chazal describe the judgment meted out to a ben sorer u’moreh, the boy who, at the tender age of 13, demonstrates indulgences and worse, and...
Parshas Shoftim – Waste Not
The belief that Jews are cheap has merit, though “frugal” would be the more perceptive word. Valuing everything, no matter how small or seemingly trivial, is a fundamental Jewish ideal. My parents rinsed and...
Parshas Eikev – Mandate and Magnificence
Carl Sagan once observed that “If you wish to make apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” There was a long period of history when the idea that the universe had...
Vo’eschanan – No Mere Miracle
The centerpiece, if such a word can be used in the context of a parshah, of Vo’eschanan is generally assumed to be the Aseres Hadibros, the Decalogue. But I think that the even more...
Devarim – Starry, Starry Night
It’s rare for city dwellers to truly see the night sky. Only once, many years ago, driving on a moonless night in West Virginia, did I fully perceive the vast number of stars –...
Parshas Mas’ei – A Historic Killing’s Echo
One of the most – if not the most – confounding laws in the Torah is that of the go’el hadam, the relative of someone who was accidentally killed, who is permitted (in some...
Pinchas – Self Changes Everything
The law of kana’im pog’im bo – “the zealous ones can attack him” – that Pinchas acted upon to dispatch Zimri and Kozbi is a highly unusual, if not singular, one: If one poses...
No Tolerance for Hooliganism
My thoughts on the obnoxious actions of a group of young Orthodox Jews at the Robinson’s Arch area of the Western Wall, and some of the reactions to them, can be read here.
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