…of the abundance of all .” Moses here reaches the climax of the paradoxical message he has communicated throughout his speeches in the book of Devarim. If one were to try to summarise it, it would be this: “For forty years you and your parents wandered in the wilderness. They were hard times, years without a home, when only by…
…with something else completely. “Vayehi chol ha’aretz saffa echat u’devarim achadim.” (Gen. 11:1) “The whole land,” not the whole earth, the whole land, “had one language and a shared vocabulary.” And the story ends with God confusing their languages. One way or another, this is not so much a story about a tower as a story about language. And the one thing…
After 9/11, when the horror and trauma had subsided, Americans found themselves asking what had happened and why. Was it a disaster? A tragedy? A crime? An act of war? It did not seem to fit the pre-existing paradigms. And why had it happened? The question most often asked about Al Qaeda was, “Why do they hate us?” In the…
Buried among the epic passages in Va’etchanan – among them the Shema and the Ten Commandments – is a brief passage with large implications for the moral life in Judaism. Here it is together with the preceding verse: Be very vigilant to keep the commandments of the Lord your God, and the testimonies and decrees with which He has charged you. Do what…
Moses’ long and tempestuous career is about to end. With words of blessing and encouragement he hands on the mantle of leadership to his successor Joshua, saying “I am a hundred and twenty years old now, and I may no longer able to enter and to leave, since the Lord has told me, ‘You shall not cross this Jordan.’” (Deut….
In a much-watched TED Talk, Simon Sinek asked the following question: how do great leaders inspire action?[1] What made people like Martin Luther King and Steve Jobs stand out from their contemporaries who may have been no less gifted, no less qualified? His answer: Most people talk about what. Some people talk about how. Great leaders, though, start with why….
The moment had come. Moses was about to die. He had seen his sister Miriam and brother Aaron pre-decease him. He had prayed to God – not to live forever, not even to live longer, but simply, “Let me go over and see the good land beyond the Jordan” (Deut. 3:25). Let me complete the journey. Let me reach the destination….
…work ethic. Today however it is losing belief in itself and is in danger of being overtaken by others. All of this was said for the first time by Moses, and it forms a central argument of the book of Devarim. If you assume – he tells the next generation – that you yourselves won the land and the freedom…
…from here on, we’re on our own.” So the Rabbi says that was not a real free acceptance of the law. Moses renews the covenant. That’s what the book of Devarim is about. Forty years on, with the next generation, and he renews the covenant, were they free when they accepted it at Sinai? The answer is still not quite,…
…with him, and another with his daughter Fania Oz-Salzberger. But it began with an act of sustained, focused listening. Shema is one of the key words of the book of Devarim, where it appears no less than 92 times. It is, in fact, one of the key words of Judaism as a whole. It is central to the two passages…