As Moses nears his death, he continues to lecture the people on God’s expectations. It is what biblical scholar Professor Jeffrey H. Tigay calls “the summons to the covenant.” He assures the people that the content of the Torah is neither unintelligible nor...
Another fundamental assumption of the Rabbis about the Torah is that there is not even one superfluous word in the Torah. There are lessons to be learned from every word or phrase no matter how seemingly trivial. For instance, the Genesis narrative includes a lengthy...
Meir Weiss has built a career on understanding the Bible as literature. His breakthrough book entitled The Bible From Within shows how the structure of the narrative helps advance our appreciation of the text. Toldot is a fine example that illustrates his method....
Righteousness is a laudable, though difficult, status to obtain. The book of Ecclesiastes proclaims that there is no person on earth so righteous to be sinless (Ecclesiastes 7:20). Noah was the first person to be called righteous and the only such person in his entire...
The Talmud (Hagigah 5a) asks a question: what does the Torah mean when it refers to “many evils and troubles that befall them” (Deuteronomy 31:21)? Rav answers that “evils” and “troubles” are not two separate circumstances but interconnected: evils that become...
American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910) once wrote: “We can act as if there were a God; feel as if we were free; consider Nature as if she were full of special designs; lay plans as if we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words...
When the Torah commands us to “love the Lord your God with all your heart…” (Deuteronomy 6:5), what kind of love is intended? Dr. Harville Hendrix provides us with a satisfying answer in his examination of words exchanged between human lovers. In his book entitled...
Before David laments King Saul and his son Jonathan who died in battle against the Philistines (II Samuel 1:18), he observes that any future victory will hinge on the prowess of the sons of Judah who were expert archers. That expertise was recognized in what David...