[Editor’s note: People are slowly becoming aware of the growth of harsh resentment of charedim in the Dat-Leumi community, which has sustained an outsize proportion of the war-related suffering. This is tragic, at a...
The parallel in wordings between the Torah’s account of the universe’s creation and of the building of the Mishkan has been noted by commentaries. I won’t cite examples here but they abound. The late...
It might be because last Shabbos was the yahrtzeit of my mother, Puah bas Rav Noach HaCohein, a”h. But, whatever the reason, she came to the fore of my mind when reviewing parshas Vayakhel,...
The Hebrew words panim and achor (as in lifnei and acharei) are used in both a spatial and temporal sense – either as “front” and “back” or as “before” and “after.” One approach to...
Since that day of infamy in October, we’ve been speculating about how the Jewish world would look different, once the war was over. We deferred talking about the day after, in order to focus...
There’s really no such thing as a kohein. At least not the way we generally pronounce the word in conversation, with the accent placed on the first syllable. In the Torah, the stress is...
The aron habris, the ark of the covenant that held the luchos, the tablets of the law, consisted of three nested boxes, the middle one of wood, the outer and inner ones of zahav...
On June 6, 1944, D-Day, more than 150,000 Allied troops stormed the coast of Normandy to begin the liberation of France from the Nazis. he criteria for choosing that day included a low but...
When I was a teenager, I wrote a short poem that went: All could be lies For we see with our eyes. Descartes, as I later discovered, beat me by some three centuries at...
Our ancestors’ wondering “Is Hashem in our midst or not?” is followed immediately in the Torah by Amalek’s attack (Shemos 17: 7-8). The word expressing Klal Yisrael’s existential doubt – “or not?” – is...
