The Israelites are almost within sight of the promised land. They have waged a victorious campaign against the Midianites. We feel the tempo quicken. No longer are the Israelites in the desert. They are moving inexorably toward the Jordan, to the west of which lies their destination: the land ‘flowing with milk and honey’. [...]
The passage (Num 27: 12-23) in which G-d tells Moses to prepare for death, and Moses, in response, asks G-d to appoint a successor, is full of interest for what it tells us about leadership. Indeed when Moses is confronted with his own mortality, his first response is not to think about himself at [...]
The story of Bilaam, 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 king of the Amorites [...]
Amid the epic themes of Chukat – the mysterious ritual of the Red Heifer, the death of Miriam and Aaron, Moses striking the rock – it is easy to miss the significance of a short passage toward the end. It is brief, cryptic, almost unintelligible and certainly does not seem to represent a major [...]
If you seek to understand an accusation, look at the accuser, not the accused. Think, for example, about one of the most famous of anti-Semitic myths: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (the classic account is Norman Cohn’s Warrant for Genocide; more recently the distinguished Israeli jurist Hadassa Ben Itto published her own [...]
Whose idea was it to send the spies? According to this week’s sedra, it was G-d. The Lord said to Moses, “Send some men to explore the land of Canaan, which I am giving to the Israelites. From each ancestral tribe send one of its leaders.” So at the Lord’s command Moses sent them [...]
Tanakh, 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. This makes it very difficult to use [...]
Last year in these studies we noted the well-known difference of opinion among the sages about the nazirite – the individual who undertook to observe special rules of holiness and abstinence: not to drink wine or other intoxicants (including anything made from grapes), not to have his hair cut and not to defile himself [...]