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The King’s Torah and the Torah’s King
Sep 6, 2024 By Barry Holtz | Commentary | Shofetim
For me the most powerful and moving part of the description in Shofetim is the delineation of the limitations on the king. Sometime in the future, God says, you will be settled in Eretz Yisrael and you will want to set a king over yourselves to be like “all the other nations” (Deut. 17:14). With almost an exasperated acceptance, God tells them if that’s what you want, you can do it. But there are restrictions that need to be in place—you can’t choose someone who is not one of your own people; the king can’t keep many horses, nor can he have many wives.
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What True Leadership Demands
Jun 15, 2020 By Barry Holtz | Commentary | Shelah Lekha
This is truly a fateful parashah. For it is in this week’s Torah reading that we learn why Israel is condemned to wander in the wilderness for forty years before entering the Promised Land. The details of the story are straightforward: Moses chooses twelve representatives, one from each of the tribes, to scout the land that the people are about to enter. The spies are given a very specific assignment: Come back with facts—is this a good land? Are the peoples who live there strong or weak? What is the produce of this land like? (Num. 13:17-20)
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The Confusion of Revelation
Jan 25, 2019 By Barry Holtz | Commentary | Yitro
We have now come to Parashat Yitro in our annual Torah reading cycle, arguably the most significant sedra in the Humash. While Parashat Bereishit has the mythic power of the creation stories and Parashat Beshallah includes the narrative of the Exodus from Egypt and the miraculous crossing of the Sea, it is in Yitro that we see the culmination of that crossing, for here in Parashat Yitro we read about our first connection to the Torah, the single most significant element of Judaism as it later evolved.
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A Sage for Today
Dec 1, 2017 By Barry Holtz | Commentary
In my new biography of Rabbi Akiva, I have tried to draw upon the latest scholarship about rabbinic stories to present the outlines of his life anew for our times, in the light of what we know about how to read these stories from our tradition and about the historical context of the ancient Jewish world. My goal was to present the various stories about Akiva’s life in an intellectually serious but accessible manner, highlighting their literary character and trying to discern the ways that Akiva’s story might speak to people today.
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The King’s Torah and the Torah’s King
Aug 25, 2017 By Barry Holtz | Commentary | Shofetim
This week’s Torah portion focuses on a wide array of topics, but underlying virtually everything we can see a thematic coherence well reflected in the parashah’s name (“judges”). The sidrah contains one of the most famous lines in the entire Bible, tzedek, tzedek tirdof: “Justice, justice shall you pursue” (Deut. 16:20). And throughout the parashah we see the Torah outlining various aspects of the pursuit of justice.
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The Routine and the Profound
Jan 29, 2011 By Barry Holtz | Commentary | Mishpatim
If Parashat Yitro, last week’s Torah reading, ends with the literal clap of God’s thunder, Parashat Mishpatim begins, perhaps not with a whimper, but certainly with at least a touch of anticlimax. From the heights of Yitro’s mystery, from the Decalogue and the Revelation, we are brought quite precipitously to the nitty-gritty of daily life, the laws of slave and slaveholder, the details of petty feuds, of accidental death and injury, of the goring ox, the fires in the vineyard, and the thief in the night.
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The Mystery of the Red Heifer
Jun 19, 2010 By Barry Holtz | Commentary | Hukkat
This week’s Torah reading opens with one of the most mysterious and incomprehensible rituals in the entire Bible. Numbers 19:1–22 describes the ritual of the red heifer—the complex practice that allows a person who has come in contact with a dead body to become “purified” of the contamination (tu’mah) that accompanies connection to those who have died. A red heifer is slaughtered, its body and blood are burned in a fire with certain woods and plants, and the ashes that remain after that burning are used in a mixture with water to create a kind of paste that is sprinkled on those who have come in contact with a corpse.
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Greeting God’s Presence in Our Lives
Mar 13, 2010 By Barry Holtz | Commentary | Shabbat Hahodesh
This week’s double parashah brings the Bible’s second book to a dramatic close. Think how far this people has come in these forty chapters: from an oppressed minority enslaved to a capricious and dangerous Pharaoh, they have become the free followers of the Almighty One, and the recipients of God’s greatest gift, the Torah.
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