Torah As Water
Nov 26, 2011 By Charlie Schwartz | Commentary | Text Study | Toledot
The metaphor of Torah as water has always resonated with me. With Torah as water, the idea of learning, engaging with, and living through our sacred texts comes into focus. Just as we cannot live for long without water, so too will our lives become desiccated and empty without the study of Torah.
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A Painful Embrace
Dec 10, 2011 By Andrew Shugerman | Commentary | Text Study | Vayishlah
Rarely do I find a midrash like the one above that reflects love and hate, admiration and anger, in a single passage about how Jews relate to Christians. While the two rabbis quoted here agree that a peculiar scribal feature is crucial to understanding Jacob and Esau’s reunion, they fundamentally disagree about what that detail signifies.
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Slaves Will One Day Be Free
Dec 17, 2011 By Abigail Treu | Commentary | Text Study | Vayeshev
In the narrative unfolding of the biblical drama, the Joseph story accounts for the arrival of Jacob’s sons and their descendants in Egypt. It also serves to introduce one of the main themes to emerge from the rest of the biblical story: the overturning of oppression with redemption.
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Tears for the Temples
Dec 31, 2011 By David Levy | Commentary | Text Study | Hanukkah
Reading this makes me think of the breaking of the glass during a Jewish wedding ceremony. In a moment of sheer joy at the marriage, we break a glass to remember the Temple and that our joy cannot be complete in light of its destruction. Here, too, the Rabbis imagine, Joseph and Benjamin cannot fully enjoy their moment with the foreknowledge that the Temples will be destroyed.
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A Deathbed Blessing
Jan 7, 2012 By Andrew Shugerman | Commentary | Text Study | Vayehi
This midrash about Jacob’s deathbed scene presents ancient rabbinic wisdom about mortality based on insights from key passages in the Hebrew Bible. By presenting biblical metaphors alongside our patriarchs’ experiences of dying, the text above teaches us to accept our limited lifetimes by acknowledging an uncomfortable reality.
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The Doubtful Path to God
Jan 21, 2012 By Charlie Schwartz | Commentary | Text Study | Va'era
Parashat Va-era opens with a dejected and depressed Moses, crestfallen after an unfruitful encounter with Pharaoh. From the text it seems that Moses had expected the redemption of the Children of Israel to be a quick in-and-out operation, leading to his dismay when the full extent of his mission became clear. This first verse of the parashah, which our midrash builds upon, forms a kind of pep talk from God to Moses, with the Divine trying to reinvigorate and restore faith to God’s servant.
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The Final Plague
Jan 28, 2012 By David Levy | Commentary | Text Study | Bo
Each year, when we read the Exodus story and again when we encounter it at the Passover seder, we are confronted with a serious moral question. We must ask ourselves how we feel about the nature of the collective punishment of the Egyptians.
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Moving Forward
Feb 4, 2012 By Abigail Treu | Commentary | Text Study | Beshallah
What a wonderful feature of being human, that we are so different that even our shared experiences produce in us such a wide range of possible emotions. Despair, regret, aggression, complaint—the midrash imagines that different people, standing at the shore of the Sea of Reeds with Pharoah’s army closing in from behind, felt each in different measure.
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