Our weekly Torah portion demands of us to ‘’love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your being and with all your might’’ (Deuteronomy 6:5). When we recall the highly dramatic narrative of the Binding of Isaac, it is quite apparent after a cursory reading of the text (Genesis 22) that Abraham loved his God even more than he loved Isaac...
The tone of your voice is important, just as much as what you’re actually saying. It is said that you can get more with honey than with vinegar, which basically means that when you’re sweet, loving, and kind, you’re more likely to convey your perspective or beliefs in a conversation
We do not need the story of Bilaam’s donkey (or more specifically she-ass), featured prominently in this week’s Torah portion, to know that it would be a mistake to call a dumb person ‘’an ass’’; an asinine person should rather be called ‘’Bilaam’’…
In Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. words: ‘’…He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it’’. Or as in baseball, three strikeouts and you are out...
What was so terribly wrong in Korah and his followers’ contention with his cousin Moses, that the Talmud singled out as a dispute that “is not for the sake of Heaven”? Contrarily, the Talmud defined the dispute between Hillel and Shammai as positive, the kind of which was for the sake of Heaven
Why did Moses send twelve scouts, or 12 tribal leaders, to tour the Promised Land before entering it? Twelve is too large a number of folks who go on an espionage mission and must, therefore, stay covert.
On a scale with hubris on one pole and self-abnegation on the other – both extremes contradict the values of Torah – humility is much closer to the latter. Humility – a behavioral conduct -- can only be seen in the presence of other people, when you turn far away from narcissism and the thought that ‘’My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth’’ (Deuteronomy 8:17).
This weekly Torah portion, Naso, is the longest among the 54 that comprise the cyclical yearly public readings. The reason for that extraordinary length of 176 verses is the successive repetition in the verbatim of five verses at the end of the portion readout tediously even twelve times, like a broken record.
In his futile attempts to ‘’dodge’’ the divine draft, Moses slandered the leaders of Israel arguing as a matter of fact that they would not listen to him; these words were nothing short of casting a verbal aspersion at others. Indeed, when Moses gathers the Israelite leaders the people do believe in his divine commission to facilitate their liberation from Egypt. Hence, after Moses had made that verbal slur God struck his hand with tsaraat, thus creating the first biblical connection between this affliction and slanderous speech.
When the Torah portion of Sh’mini was timed a l o n g time ago in Babylon to fall soon after Passover no one could anticipate that many centuries later it would fall in very close proximity to the State of Israel’s day of commemorating the Holocaust (Yom Ha-Shoah) on 27 Nissan...
