The Telling
Apr 2, 2015 By David Hoffman | Commentary | Pesah
This Friday evening we will gather with family and friends. We will sit down to beautifully set tables, and each of us will open one of the most popular and well-known of Hebrew books—the Haggadah. The name of the book comes from the Hebrew verb lehagid (“to tell”), and if we were to translate “haggadah” into English, it would be “the telling.” Not surprisingly, the core of the Haggadah is the section called maggid, a word that also derives from the Hebrew root meaning “to tell.” Clearly these two forms of the verb lehagid communicate the centrality of the activity of “telling” on this night. But here things become less clear.
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Crackers for God
Mar 16, 2015 By William Friedman | Commentary | Shabbat Hahodesh | Vayikra | Pesah
What kind of gift would you give a king? In the interests of both respect and self-preservation, probably the nicest thing you could afford! And if you’d give this to a human king, how much more would you give to the King of Kings of Kings? And yet the Torah prescribes that any grain offered in the Temple cannot contain either yeast or honey. That’s right: the only appropriate grain offering for God is matzah—the tasteless cracker that is about to become the source of so much complaining on Passover! Why would the Torah tell us to do such a thing?
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The Artist’s Insight
Mar 13, 2015 By Lilly Kaufman | Commentary | Pekudei | Vayak-hel
From October of last year until mid-February, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, in collaboration with Tate Modern in London, featured a comprehensive exhibition entitled Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs. It was a reassessment of Matisse’s colored paper cut-outs, which, according to the program notes, “reflect…a renewed commitment to form and color, and . . . inventiveness”. Matisse himself said, “For me, a colour is a force. My pictures are made up of four or five colours that collide with one another, and the collision gives a sense of energy.” (Sooke, Henri Matisse: A Second Life, pp. 97-98.)
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Written on the Heart
Feb 27, 2015 By Eitan Fishbane | Commentary | Shabbat Zakhor | Tetzavveh
The mitzvot are a path of spiritual practice, a cultivation of religious awareness that may open us to the mystery and urgency of the divine voice. Not only legal obligation, mitzvah is a moment of encounter with the ever-renewing Divine Presence as it reverberates through the generations of the Jewish people.
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Gold and Incense: For Better and for Worse
Feb 20, 2015 By Stephen A. Geller | Commentary | Terumah
Parashat Terumah begins the long section of the Book of Exodus that deals with the Tabernacle, its furniture and vessels, and the garments of the high priest. The only interruption in this mass of cultic detail is the narrative of the sin of worshipping the Golden Calf and its aftermath in Exodus 32–34. The ritual details continue into Vayikra with the list of sacrifices in the cult. The climax of the entire cultic section is Leviticus 9 and 10, where the Tabernacle is dedicated with elaborate rites.
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Sacrifice in Middle Age
Mar 24, 2007 By Arnold M. Eisen | Commentary | Vayikra
It took middle age to bring me to appreciation of Leviticus — that, and the work of biblical scholars like Jacob Milgrom and anthropologists like Mary Douglas. Now I approach the book each year truly grateful that it exists to confront me again with aspects of life and death I might otherwise have missed or avoided.
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Why the Jews?
Oct 21, 2007 By Arnold M. Eisen | Commentary | Noah
Why did the Creator of all humanity decide upon the surprising step of establishing a special relationship with one small segment of humanity?
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The Lessons of Va-era
Jan 5, 2008 By Arnold M. Eisen | Commentary | Va'era
This week’s parashah abounds in venerable theological problems, beginning with its name and opening verses. How could it be that God “appeared” to the ancestors but that some aspect of God—or some truth articulated in God’s name—was not “made known” to them and will be revealed only now, to Moses? The answer that seems most persuasive to me bears a lesson that, like so many others in the Torah, is not so much theological as ethical; it teaches far less about the nature of God than it does about human responsibility.
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