…the eyes of humanity and God. Around the Shabbat Table What other times in Sefer Bereishit and the greater Tanach have name changes and the importance of recognising a name come up? Why do you think the Torah places so much emphasis on what someone is called? Think about a time when you faced a complex moral decision. How did…
…The Torah suggests a solution to this complex dynamic: first separate, then join. This principle is evident from the Creation story in Bereishit, where God separates light from darkness, water from dry land, and so forth. Separation is at the heart of Jewish law – distinguishing between holy and unholy, pure and impure, permitted and forbidden. In Judaism, kadosh, or…
…Name ‘Hashem’ I did not make Myself fully known to them” (Shemot 6:1-2). This statement implies that God is revealing Himself in a way He has not done before. Rashi clarifies that this does not mean the avot were unaware of the name ‘Hashem’. Indeed, God’s first words to Avraham used this very name, and soon after, in Bereishit 12:7-8,…
…the first mention of holiness in the Torah? This Week’s Parsha Puzzle Answer: Bereishit 2:3 – “Vayekadesh oto” – when God made the Shabbat day holy. This is the first and only mention of holiness in the book of Bereishit. This question has been adapted from Torah IQ by David Woolf, a collection of 1,500 Torah riddles, available on Amazon….
…God rejects humanity, saving only Noach, when He sees the world full of violence. Yet after the Flood He vows: “Never again will I curse the ground because of humans, even though every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done” (Bereishit 8:21). That is the…
…a moment of solidarity, midway between enslavement in Egypt and the social inequalities that would later emerge in Israel. It was an ideal never to be forgotten, even if never fully captured again in real space and time. Judaism never forgot its vision of natural and social harmony, set out in the beginnings of the books of Bereishit and Bamidbar,…
…to reach in building the tower. The thematic elements of the narrative are thus clear. This is a story about heaven and earth – but in what way? To understand the point at issue we must return to the opening chapter of Bereishit and its description of creation. Two words in that account are decisive. The first is tov, “good,”…
…do with faces: the face of Esau, of Jacob, and of God himself. What is going on? The clue lies in Jacobs use of the word “blessing”. This takes us back twenty-two years to another fateful moment (Bereishit chapter 27) in which Jacob, dressed in Esau’s clothes, takes his brother’s blessing (whether by accident or design, the term b-r-ch ,…
…condition as such: obedience and rebellion, faith and fratricide, hubris and nemesis, technology and violence, the order God makes and the chaos we create. Not until the twelfth chapter of Bereishit does the Torah turn to the particular, to one family, that of Abraham and Sarah, and the covenant God enters into with them and their descendants. That duality and…
…day the Lord made (literally “cut”) a covenant with Abram . . . Bereishit 15 So at the Red Sea the Israelites passed “between the pieces” (the waters, rather than the halves of animals) in a ratification of the covenant with Abraham. They passed from one domain to another, from being slaves – avadim – to Pharaoh to becoming servants…