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 [...]
This week’s sedra begins with a continuation of the census begun in last week’s – the act that gives the entire book its English name: the book of “Numbers.” Two things, though, are puzzling. The first is the very act of numbering the people. Jewish tradition conveys two quite different, apparently contradictory, attitudes toward [...]
On the face of it the connections between the sedra and haftarah of Bemidbar are slender. The first has to do with demography. Bemidbar 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 [...]
I want, in this study, to look at one of Judaism’s most distinctive and least understood characteristics – the chronological imagination. The modern world was shaped by four revolutions: the English, the American, the French and the Russian. Two – the English and American – were inspired by the Hebrew Bible which in the [...]
In its account of the festivals of the Jewish year, this week’s parshah 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 [...]
At the centre of the mosaic books is Vayikra. At the centre 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 sidrot of Tazria and Metsorah contain laws which are among the most difficult to understand. They are about conditions of “impurity” arising from the fact that we are physical beings, embodied souls, and hence exposed to (in Hamlet’s words) “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” Though we have immortal longings, [...]
The shock is immense. For several weeks and many chapters – the longest prelude in the Torah – we have read of the preparations for the moment at which G-d would bring His presence to rest in the midst of the people. Five sedrot (Terumah, Tetzaveh, Ki Tissa, Vayakhel and Pekudei) describe the instructions [...]