…commanded to do for God. On the other, it means slavery — what the Israelites were forced to do for the Egyptians. Avodah is a key word in the opening chapter of Shemot. So they, Egypt, made the children of Israel subservient with crushing labour. They embittered their lives with hard servitude in loam and in bricks and with all…
Right at the end of the book of Shemot there is a textual difficulty so slight that it is easy to miss, yet – as interpreted by Rashi – it contains one of the great clues as to the nature of Jewish identity: moving testimony to the unique challenge of being a Jew. First, the background. The Tabernacle is finally complete. Its…
…is saturated with the language of love. The root a-h-v appears in Shemot twice, in Vayikra twice (both in Lev. 19), in Badmibar not at all, but in Sefer Devarim 23 times. Devarim is a book about societal beatitude and the transformative power of love. Nothing could be more misleading and invidious than the Christian contrast between Christianity as a…
…phenomenon we noted in parshat Shemot that “the more they afflicted them the more they grew and the more they spread.” They also and especially envied them their sense of chosenness (despite the fact that virtually every other nation in history has seen itself as chosen).[5] It is absolutely essential that we, as Jews, should conduct ourselves with an extra…
…short, two of them appear in Sefer Shemot. You have the third in parshat Emor, chapter 23. You have the fourth in chapters 28 and 29 of Sefer Bamidbar. And the fifth in chapter 16 of Devarim. And they’re all different, and they all use different language, and they have different focuses, different dimensions of the festival. And if you…
…Peace – this refers to Aaron. Shemot Rabbah 5:10 The Midrash brings proof-texts for each of these identifications, but we understand them immediately. Moses and Aaron were quite different in temperament and role. Moses was the man of truth, Aaron of peace. Without truth, there can be no vision to inspire a nation. But without internal peace, there is no…
Bamidbar takes up the story as we left it toward the end of Shemot. The people had journeyed from Egypt to Mount Sinai. There they received the Torah. There they made the Golden Calf. There they were forgiven after Moses’ passionate plea, and there they made the Mishkan, the Tabernacle, inaugurated on the first of Nissan, almost a year after…
The Parsha in a Nutshell The Torah’s explanation of the design and building of the Mishkan (the portable Temple) is the longer passage in the whole book of Shemot.) It begins this week in Terumah and continues all the way through to the end of Shemot (only taking a short break to tell the story of the Golden Calf). The…
…they could be problematic. In Shemot verses 19-24, we see the original plan was that God would be the people’s sovereign and lawmaker. He would be their King, not their neighbour. He would be distant, not close (see Shemot 33:3, Also see the haftarah for Tzav, from the book of Yirmiyahu). The people would obey His laws; they would not…
…be holy “You shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Shemot 19:6). Our chapter now spells this out for the first time. “The Lord said to Moses, “Speak to the entire assembly of Israel and say to them: Be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy” (Vayikra 19:1-2). This tells us that the…