Posted on: November 28th, 2013

Joseph may have known ancient Egyptian traditions about seven-year famines.

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Posted on: October 24th, 2013

The purchase of the Cave of Machpelah is evidently a highly significant event because it is recorded in great detail.

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Posted on: October 10th, 2013

Leaders lead. They don’t conform for the sake of conforming. They don’t do what others do merely because others are doing it. They think outside the box. They march to a different tune.

Posted on: September 25th, 2013

Could we understand the history of Israel without its prehistory, the stories of Abraham and Sarah and their children?

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Posted on: September 4th, 2013

It was Moses who mediated with God.

Posted on: August 29th, 2013

The Torah scroll is the nearest Judaism comes to endowing a physical entity with sanctity.

Posted on: August 22nd, 2013

The ancients saw the gods in nature, never more so than in thinking about the harvest and all that accompanied it.

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Posted on: August 15th, 2013

Fathers shall not be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their fathers -- how is that compatible with the idea that children may suffer for the sins of their parents?

Posted on: August 7th, 2013

On the face of it, the test is simple: if what the prophet predicts comes to pass, he is a true prophet; if not, not. Clearly, though, it was not that simple.

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Posted on: August 1st, 2013

These stories all have to do with the mitzvah of tzedakah whose source is in this week’s parshah.

Posted on: July 25th, 2013

One of the more unusual aspects of being a chief rabbi is that one comes to know people one otherwise might not.

Posted on: July 18th, 2013

The biblical covenant has the same literary structure as ancient near eastern political treaties.

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Posted on: July 11th, 2013

Shakespeare is expressing the medieval stereotype of Christian mercy (Portia) as against Jewish justice (Shylock).

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Posted on: June 6th, 2013

For the first and only time, Moses invokes a miracle to prove the authenticity of his mission

Posted on: May 29th, 2013

This week’s sedrah, Shelach Lecha, ends with one of the great commands of Judaism – tzitzit, the fringes we wear on the corner of our garments as a perennial reminder of our identity as Jews and our obligation to keep the Torah’s commands.

Posted on: May 22nd, 2013

Tanach, the Hebrew Bible, is remarkable for the extreme realism with which it portrays human character. Its heroes are not superhuman. Its non-heroes are not archetypal villains. The best have failings; the worst often have saving virtues. I know of no other religious literature quite like it.

Posted on: May 8th, 2013

On the face of it, the connections between the sedrah and haftarah of Bamidbar are slender. The first has to do with demography. Bamidbar begins with a census of the people. The haftarah begins with Hosea’s vision of a time when “the number of the children of Israel will be like the sand on the seashore, which cannot be measured or numbered.” There was a time when the Israelites could be counted; the day will come when they will be countless. That is one contrast between the future and the past.

Posted on: April 24th, 2013

In its account of the festivals of the Jewish year, this week’s parshah, Parshat Emor, contains the following statement: “You shall dwell in thatched huts for seven days. Everyone included in Israel must live in such thatched huts. This is so that future generations will know that I caused the Israelites to live in sukkot when I brought them out of Egypt. I am the Lord your G-d.”

Posted on: April 17th, 2013

At the center of the mosaic books is Vayikra. At the center of Vayikra is the “holiness code” (chapter 19) with its momentous call: “You shall be holy because I, the Lord your G-d, am holy.” And at the centre of chapter 19 is a brief paragraph which, by its positioning, is the apex, the high point, of the Torah:

Posted on: March 20th, 2013

Judaism is less a philosophical system than a field of tensions – between universalism and particularism, for example, or exile and redemption, priests and prophets, cyclical and linear time, and so on.