Marketing Judaism
Feb 19, 2011 By Abigail Treu | Commentary | Text Study | Ki Tissa
If the Torah you teach isn’t sexy, don’t teach it. An unassailable marketing message rooted in a play on words: “had finished” is kekaloto, which─especially written as it is, missing the letter vav toward the end─could be rendered instead “as his bride.”
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Torah in the Face of Tragedy
Mar 9, 1996 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Ki Tissa
The month of Adar has hardly been a herald of joy for our people this year, as it traditionally is.
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The Lesson of the Golden Calf
Feb 26, 1994 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Ki Tissa
One third of the book of Exodus is devoted to the construction of the tabernacle, God’s mobile dwelling in the wilderness. I suspect that we moderns find the devil, and not God, in the profusion and repetition of details. The Torah could mercifully have spared us its twice-told tale, first God’s instructions to Moses (Ex. 25-31) and then his execution of them (Ex. 35-40).
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Transcending “Soulless Piety”
Mar 2, 2002 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Ki Tissa
Writing in the week of my father’s yahrzeit, I am drawn to reflect again on some of the spiritual heirlooms he left behind. One of my favorites is the piquant term “soulless piety” which he coined to describe an all too common phenomenon that results when ritual observance loses its emotional charge and we find ourselves just going through the motions. Judaism is a religion predicated on behavior rather than belief; compliance outranks spontaneity in its scale of values.
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Mountains Hanging by a Hair
Feb 18, 1995 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Ki Tissa
The Mishnah, edited by Rabbi Judah the Patriarch around the year 200, describes the laws of Shabbat as “mountains hanging by a hair,” because its vast legal articulation rests on such a slight scriptural base. The comment is disarmingly candid and wholly accurate. From the Torah itself we know that the weekly observance of Shabbat is to be the centerpiece of the Israelite religious edifice, yet we garner very little about how the Torah understands the concept of rest.
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Bronze Bull, Golden Calf
Feb 26, 2016 By Tim Daniel Bernard | Commentary | Ki Tissa
The metal bovine with a peculiar magnetism that is known as the Golden Calf (Exod. 32) brings to mind Arturo Di Modica’s Charging Bull (1989). A potent Financial District icon, it exerts a remarkable pull on passersby (on its webcam you can see the crowd so often around the statue). According to the artist’s website, it was designed as a “symbol of virility and courage” and “the perfect antidote to the Wall Street crash of 1986,” but it was also created without the invitation of the Wall Street community and was promptly removed from its original location in front of the New York Stock Exchange.
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Who Wrote The Ten Commandments?
Feb 26, 2016 By Benjamin D. Sommer | Commentary | Ki Tissa
Where does our Torah come from? Did all the words of the Torah come from heaven, so that the Torah is a perfect divine work? If that is the case, then the tradition the Torah inaugurates is one that human beings should accept in its entirety without introducing any changes. Or is the Torah itself the result of human-divine collaboration? If that is the case, the tradition the Torah inaugurates may allow some change, at least by those Jews of each generation who accept the Torah and live by its commandments.
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Bodies in Mirrors
Mar 1, 2003 By Lauren Eichler Berkun | Commentary | Ki Tissa
In the midst of an elaborate description of Bezalel’s artistic crafting of the Tabernacle, we read an unusual detail: “He made the laver of copper and its stand of copper, from the mirrors of the women who performed tasks at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting” (Ex. 38:8). This copper laver served as a basin for cleansing waters so that the priests could enter the Tabernacle in a state of ritual purity. Why would Bezalel craft such an important vessel from women’s mirrors? Why does the Torah mention this specific detail?
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