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Nov 24, 2015 By Marcus Mordecai Schwartz | Commentary | Vayishlah
In Parashat Vayishlah, Jacob returns to the Land of Canaan after a long absence and finds trouble rather than the comforts of home. He prepares to meet his estranged and potentially violent brother.
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How Full of Awe Is This Place!
Nov 28, 2014 By Marcus Mordecai Schwartz | Commentary | Vayetzei
In 1969, as a senior pursuing a BFA at the University of Memphis, my mother, Ann Kibel Schwartz, made a series of prints, including this one on themes from Genesis, as her senior thesis. She drew the images for these prints from magazines, newspapers, and print advertisements. The images were starkly modern, but their juxtaposition in collage, drawing on the ancient themes of the Torah, created an old-new whole.
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The Many Languages of Torah
Jan 3, 2014 By Marcus Mordecai Schwartz | Commentary | Bo
Sometimes basic questions are the hardest to answer. For example, I know that one plus one equals two, but when asked to prove it logically, I may struggle a bit before I can express it.
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Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 157b
Oct 9, 2009 By Marcus Mordecai Schwartz | Text Study
Our Sages forbade us to take measurements on Shabbat. In their day, as in ours, measurements were most often associated with commerce. They strove to create a day free from the workaday stresses of acquisition. We see this sensitivity in this prohibition, as in the many prohibitions and commandments we have seen throughout the year. As we began the year, I hoped to convey that Shabbat is first and foremost a spiritual discipline.
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Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 113a
Oct 2, 2009 By Marcus Mordecai Schwartz | Text Study
Some of our Sages felt that objects which could not be used on Shabbat in any permitted way should be utterly outlawed for the entire twenty-five-hour period of Shabbat. This prohibition, termed by the Talmud, Issur Tilltul (the prohibition on moving an object), eventually came to be known as muktzeh(things placed to the side). If an object has no use on Shabbat, it is in this category and, generally, may not be picked up and moved to another location on Shabbat.
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Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 42a–b
Sep 23, 2009 By Marcus Mordecai Schwartz | Text Study
Cooking is forbidden on Shabbat. This is already clear in the Torah. In Exodus 16:23, Moses commands the Israelites to bake their manna before Shabbat begins. But what are the limits of cooking? Does adding spice to a completed dish constitute cooking? When is the cooking process considered to be complete?
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Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 35b
Sep 18, 2009 By Marcus Mordecai Schwartz | Text Study
When does Shabbat begin? When does it end? What separates the mundane time of the week from the transcendent time of Shabbat? The simple answer is that Shabbat is the seventh day of the week. Since Genesis 1 places the night before the morning (“And there was evening, and there was morning . . . “), Shabbat begins at nightfall on Friday. But how do we define nightfall? When the sun sets? When it gets dark? When the stars come out?
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Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 34a
Aug 29, 2009 By Marcus Mordecai Schwartz | Text Study
Certain things must be done before Shabbat begins. Our mishnah gives a checklist of three things about which the head of a family must inquire as Shabbat begins. Have the necessary tithes been taken from the produce? Has the boundary delineating the extent of private space, the eruv, been properly established? Have the Shabbat lights been lit?
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Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 30a-b
Aug 22, 2009 By Marcus Mordecai Schwartz | Text Study
We are called upon to live a life of mitzvot, not die deaths in our attempt to fulfill God’s commandments. A dangerously sick person requires our care and we are commanded to desecrate Shabbat to fully see to his or her care. Our source puts forward a question about this with regard to a light that is preventing a sick person from sleeping. Are we allowed to desecrate Shabbat by extinguishing the flame and thereby help make rest and recovery possible?
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Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 12a
Aug 15, 2009 By Marcus Mordecai Schwartz | Text Study
We do not make personal petitions on Shabbat, leaving them for our weekday prayers. What then do we do when visiting the sick on Shabbat? During the week, prayer for healing is an element of our visit, but during Shabbat we should transcend our human needs so that we may gain a taste of the world to come. Nonetheless, we still remain in possession of our bodies on Shabbat and may still fall ill. Illness may sometimes inspire us to spiritual growth, but on the whole, most of us would say that we do not desire suffering or its rewards. So how do we approach the tension between the desire to overcome the physical on Shabbat and remain cognizant of the need for physical healing?
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Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 25b
Aug 8, 2009 By Marcus Mordecai Schwartz | Text Study
How do we transcend the physical on Shabbat? Our physical existence is temporary, and our bodies are eventually subject to the most horrendous filth, decrepitude, and rot. Shabbat promises a vision of the world to come, in which we imagine our physical decline halted and even reversed. We light Shabbat lamps to inaugurate this period, and light illumines our spirits as well as our homes. But what about our bodies? How do we prepare our all too imperfect flesh for the holy Sabbath?
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Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 24a
Aug 1, 2009 By Marcus Mordecai Schwartz | Text Study
Our liturgy is a reflection of our values. On Shabbat, festivals, and Rosh Hodesh (the new moon), we read publicly from the Torah to connect our souls more deeply with God, divine wisdom, and the mitzvot. We also read from the Torah on Mondays and Thursdays so that we never go more than three days without Torah. However, on Shabbat and festivals we read a much larger passage than on Rosh Hodesh. Why?
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Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 22a
Jul 25, 2009 By Marcus Mordecai Schwartz | Text Study
Abbaye (a mid-fourth-century Sage from Babylonia) reports that his teacher and adoptive father, Rabba bar Nachmani, usually followed the rulings of the early-third-century figure Rav. Here, Abbaye also provides us with three areas in which his master departed from Rav’s approach, favoring instead that of Rav’s contemporary, Shemuel. In all three cases, Rabba bar Nachmani, Abbaye reports, followed Shemuel’s more lenient approach. Let us focus on the last of these three, the case of dragging a bench over open ground on Shabbat.
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Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 20b
Jul 18, 2009 By Marcus Mordecai Schwartz | Text Study
Spoken words are central to Jewish thought, religion, and practice. Our Sages believed that the world was created with divine utterances and their Torah was transmitted from mouth to ear. The word mishnah probably means recited teaching. The Mishnah was almost certainly imported to Babylonia in an entirely oral form. But what would happen if the meaning of an obscure Hebrew word in the Mishnah was forgotten? This is exactly the situation that motivates Rabin and Abbaye’s Aramaic dialog in the above conversation.
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Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 18a
Jul 11, 2009 By Marcus Mordecai Schwartz | Text Study
My selection this week begins with an ellipsis. Preceding this source are a range of regulations allowing passive forms of labor that begin before the commencement of Shabbat to continue throughout Shabbat. For instance, the Talmud allows us to place clothing into a solution of dye or set nets to catch fish just before Shabbat begins and then to reap the rewards of our labors after Shabbat, even though the clothes took the dye and the fish were caught (without human action) on Shabbat. Our source (most likely a second-century text from Eretz Yisra’el) presents an exception to this general rule: One may not place unmilled wheat under the stones prior to Shabbat and allow the water or wind to grind them over Shabbat. The question is why should this be prohibited, when the dye and traps are permitted.
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Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 17b
Jul 4, 2009 By Marcus Mordecai Schwartz | Text Study
The Sages inherited a system of Shabbat observance that proscribed carrying any item of significance from one domain to another. Money is obviously of great material significance in our lives, and we are to leave it safely at home as we travel on Shabbat. But what if, through no fault of our own, we are still on the road with money in our pockets when Shabbat begins. We have seen the solution before: Mishnah Shabbat 24:1 allows us to place the money with a non-Jewish companion for the duration of the sabbath. In our source above, Ula gives us more information about the origins of this solution.
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Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 44a
Jun 27, 2009 By Marcus Mordecai Schwartz | Text Study
One of my first memories of Shabbat is a vision of the beauty of the Shabbat candles. Accompanying this memory is the first Shabbat restriction that I recall learning: “We don’t touch the Shabbat candles or move them.” As I noted in an earlier piece, for our Sages, the Shabbat lights are a way of ensuringshalom bayit—household harmony.
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Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 128b
Jun 20, 2009 By Marcus Mordecai Schwartz | Text Study
As we move into the summer months, I wanted to revisit this source that we saw earlier in the year. As we mentioned the last time we saw it, this source limns the boundaries of our responsibility to protect our animals on Shabbat. According to this source, one may violate a Rabbinic commandment to preserve an animal from suffering on Shabbat. Here we see that the destruction of the blankets and pillows (usually forbidden on Shabbat) is legitimate if the purpose is to preserve the animal from harm.
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Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 12a
Jun 13, 2009 By Marcus Mordecai Schwartz | Text Study
The two first-century schools of Rabbinic thought, Beit Shamai and Beit Hillel, crop up quite often in the Talmud. Here Rabbi Shimon b. Elazar, an early third-century Sage, quotes their positions. This dispute between the two schools goes to the heart of what the experience of Shabbat should encompass. On the one hand, as I mentioned last week, there is the principle that Shabbat is a time that should be free from worry.
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Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 12a-b
Jun 6, 2009 By Marcus Mordecai Schwartz | Text Study
Shabbat and prayer are deeply connected in the mind of the contemporary Jew. Shabbat is the time when many of us engage in public prayer each week. Though most Conservative synagogues have a weekday minyan, usually its attendance is much smaller than that of the Shabbat service. So it is surprising when we discover that our Sages frowned on the practice of making personal requests of God on Shabbat.
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