There is one aspect of Christianity that Jews, if we are to be honest, must reject, and that Christians, most notably Pope John XXIII, have begun to reject. It is the concept of rejection itself, the idea that Christianity represents G-d’s rejection of the Jewish people, the “old Israel”. This is known technically as Supersession [...]
One of the most striking features of the torah is its emphasis on love of, and vigilance toward, the ger, the stranger: Do not oppress a stranger; you yourselves know how it feels to be strangers, because you were strangers in Egypt. (Ex. 23: 9) For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord [...]
Alongside the holiness of place and person is the holiness of time, something parshat Emor charts in its deceptively simple list of festivals and holy days (Lev. 23: 1-44). Time plays an enormous part in Judaism. The first thing G-d declared holy was a day: Shabbat, at the conclusion of creation. The first mitzvah given [...]
The nineteenth chapter of Vayikra, with which our parsha begins, is one of the supreme statements of the ethics of the Torah. It’s about the right, the good and the holy, and it contains some of Judaism’s greatest moral commands: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself,” and “Let the stranger who lives among you [...]
I had been engaged in dialogue for two years with an imam from the Middle East, a gentle and seemingly moderate man. One day, in the middle of our conversation, he turned to me and asked, “Why do you Jews need a land? After all, Judaism is a religion, not a country or a nation.” [...]
As we saw last week, the sages understood tsaraat, the theme of this week’s parsha, not as an illness but as a miraculous public exposure of the sin of lashon hara, speaking badly about people. Judaism is a sustained meditation on the power of words to heal or harm, mend or destroy. Just as God created the [...]
It was the Septuagint, the early Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, that translated tzaraat, the condition whose identification and cleansing occupies much of Tazria and Metsora as lepra, giving rise to a long tradition identifying it with leprosy. That tradition is now widely acknowledged to be incorrect. First, the condition described in the Torah simply does [...]
Shmini tells the tragic story of how the great inauguration of the tabernacle, a day about which the sages said that G-d rejoiced as much as he had at the creation of the universe, was overshadowed by the death of two of Aaron’s sons, Nadav and Avihu: “Aaron’s sons Nadav and Avihu took their censers, [...]