Weekly Torah Reading, Vayyerlekh, October 5, 2019
Moses Didn’t Want to Die In this week’s Torah reading, God instructs Moses that the time has come for him to die—in fact, He says this more than once. The reading opens with Moses relating that “the Lord said …
Weekly Torah Reading, Vayyelekh, October 5, 2019
Moses Didn’t Want to Die In this week’s Torah reading, God instructs Moses that the time has come for him to die—in fact, He says this more than once. The reading opens with Moses relating that “the Lord said …
Weekly Torah Reading, Ki Tavo, September 21, 2019
In Seventy Languages In this week’s reading, the Israelites are about to enter the promised land. At this crucial point, they are given an odd instruction: On the very day that you cross the Jordan River, set up some large …
Weekly Torah Reading, Ki Tetze, Sept 14, 2019
(Deuteronomy 21:10-25:19) This week’s reading is full of commandments, more than any other reading in the annual cycle. They cover all sorts of things that can arise in daily life, governing relations between husbands and wives, parents and …
Weekly Torah Reading, Shofetim, September 7, 2019
A Hollow Ring I suspect many speakers of modern Hebrew are fooled by the second word in this week’s Torah reading. In today’s Israel, shoterim are policemen—and this same root also underlies the collective mishtarah, “police.” But there were …
Weekly Torah Reading, Re’eh, August 31, 2019
The Children of God This week’s reading contains an odd injunction: “You are children of the Lord your God,” it says, “You shall not gash yourselves or shave the front of your heads for the dead” (Deut 14:1). Ancient …
Weekly Torah Reading, Ekev, August 24, 2019
The Shema, Part II The Shema (“Shema Yisrael,” etc.) is rightly thought of as summing up the basic message of the Torah. But what is that message? We saw last week that it was not simply “Don’t worship any other …
Weekly Torah Reading, Va-etḥannan, August 17, 2019
What Did the Shema Originally Mean? According to a rabbinic tradition, when the “men of Jericho” recited the Shema, they would say it in a slightly different way from that followed by Jews nowadays. They would recite the first …