Managing Our Disagreements
Jan 20, 2017 By Alex Sinclair | Commentary | Shemot
This erev Shabbat is Inauguration Day. Right after the election, This American Life broadcast a conversation between two old friends, one of whom had voted Trump and one Clinton. These two friends disagree strongly with each other, but, thanks to their friendship, mutual respect, and faith in the other’s goodness, they are able to have a civil, thoughtful, reasonable political conversation.
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A Deserved Punishment
Dec 25, 2010 By Abigail Treu | Commentary | Text Study | Shemot
The only thing juicier than a murder mystery is a murder mystery involving illicit sex. The midrashic imagination has woven a wonderful narrative to excuse Moses of the murder he commits in Exodus 2:12. It is a wonderful story from rabbinic literature that is worth sharing in and of itself.
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The Eternity of Judaism
Jan 1, 1994 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Shemot
When Solomon Schechter assumed the presidency of the Seminary some 90 years ago, he chose for its motto and symbol a verse from this week’s parasha: “And the bush was not consumed (Exodus 3:2).” I believe he intended to convey thereby his conviction in the eternity of Judaism. It would not perish in the new world as it had not perished in the old, because its power derived not from numbers or wealth, but from the spirit. As a center of Torah, the Seminary would fortify that spirit with a large measure of truthful piety.
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Hearing Revelation
Dec 24, 1994 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Shemot
The Torah devotes nearly 40 verses to the exchange between God and Moses at the burning bush. No divine-human encounter of a personal nature gets similar coverage. The wealth of material gives us an idea of how revelation works, then and now. For the Torah is more than a collection of one-time religious experiences beyond our ken. God’s voice continues to fill the universe. We need to relearn how to hear it.
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Justice Is the New Counter-Culture
Jan 4, 1997 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Shemot
The book of Genesis ends on an Egyptian note: after his death, Joseph was embalmed and placed in a coffin to await burial in the land that God had promised his ancestors. Embalming is quintessentially Egyptian, one of a panoply of practices designed to obscure the reality of death. The whole religious tenor of Genesis bristles at the very idea; human life is but an extension of the earth: “For dust you are,” God tells a fallen Adam, “and to dust you shall return (Genesis 3:19).” To facilitate this merger, Jews in Israel are still buried without benefit of a coffin.
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A Stranger to Israel
Jan 17, 1998 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Shemot
I find the figure of Moses endlessly fascinating. He is the founder of Israel and its greatest prophet, a sculptor who works with human life, transforming a clan into a nation, a motley multitude into a polity of high moral order. Seized by God, he labors to complete the social vision first glimpsed by Abraham. As his ancestor abjured the religion of Mesopotamia, he rejects the religion of Egypt. In their stead, he voices the full scope of monotheism and lends it both cultic and political form. The measure of the man lies in the odds against him: the might of the Egyptian empire, the unheroic nature of a people impaired by slavery and his status as a stranger to Israelite society.
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God’s Human Partner
Jan 5, 2002 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Shemot
At the end of their gripping biography of Abraham Joshua Heschel (unfortunately chronicling only the European phase of his life), Edward Kaplan and Samuel Dresner report that he arrived in New York on March 21, 1940 aboard the Lancastria. For a moment, after reading that tidbit, I wondered if uncannily the Schorsch family had come on the same ship. I dimly knew that the month of our arrival had been March 1940.
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Midrash in the Prince of Egypt
Jan 9, 1999 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Shemot
Jeffrey Katzenberg’s Prince of Egypt is a midrash on the exodus story, a specimen of reader participation in the recounting of ancient Israel’s foundation epic. While respecting the articulate contours of the biblical narrative, Mr. Katzenberg fills in the gaps with a distinctly contemporary sensibility. To my mind, the most imaginative and effective of these additions to the text is the relationship between Moses and the pharaoh of the exodus. They are portrayed as half-brothers and childhood friends. The film takes advantage of the Torah’s complete silence on Moses’s long years in the pharaoh’s palace to introduce a dramatic twist and humane subtext to the well-known cosmic contest between the God of the patriarchs and the gods of Egypt. It would have us imagine that in the royal domain Moses not only assimilated the mores of the Egyptian aristocracy, but also became the closest friend of Ramses, who was destined to be the next ruler of Egypt. The first quarter of the film is in fact devoted to the escapades of this carefree and destructive twosome, with Moses clearly the dominant figure.
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