…Ashamnu and Al Chet shows us that, actually, most of the sins we confess are about our dealings with other people. The first Jew to admit he made a mistake was Yehuda, who had wrongly Tamar his daughter-in-law Tamar, and then, realising his mistake, said, “She is more righteous than I” (Bereishit 38:26). It is surely more than a coincidence…
…about before. It was all the way back in Parshat Bereishit where we learned that God rested on the seventh day of Creation? But in Beshallach, Shabbat becomes official in a different way. Living in the desert, Bnei Yisrael eat miraculous maan that falls from the sky. In this week’s parsha they are commanded to collect a double portion of…
…there was no Siddur, no Amidah, and no fixed prayers, but you still needed to daven three times a day? Parsha Puzzle Question Q. Which of the books of the Torah mention camels? (See below for the answer) This Week’s Parsha Puzzle Answer: Bamidbar is the only book without mention of a single camel. In Bereishit, the men who buy…
…in the last word of the priestly blessing: shalom, peace. The 15th-century Spanish Jewish commentator Rabbi Isaac Arama explains that shalom means completeness, perfection, and the harmonious working of a complex system. This concept of peace heavily depends on the vision of Bereishit, in which God brings order out of tohu va-vohu, chaos, creating a world in which each object…
…Puzzle Answer: It depends which Korach we are speaking about! In parshat Korach, Kehat would be Korach’s grandfather (Bamidbar 16:1). The other Korach is Eisav and Ahalivama’s son. This Korach’s grandfather is Yitzchak! (Bereishit 36:5). This question has been adapted from Torah IQ by David Woolf, a collection of 1,500 Torah riddles, available on Amazon. DOWNLOAD AND PRINT THE FAMILY…
In stately prose the Torah in its opening chapter describes the unfolding of the universe, the effortless creation of a single creative Force. Repeatedly we read, “And God said, Let there be … and there was … and God saw that it was good” – until we come to the creation of humankind. Suddenly the whole tone of the narrative…
“And God said, let there be… And there was… and God saw that it was good.” Thus unfolds the most revolutionary as well as the most influential account of creation in the history of the human spirit. In Rashi’s commentary, he quotes Rabbi Isaac who questioned why the Torah should start with the story of creation at all.[1] Given that…
…care for him? Yet You have made him little lower than the angels And crowned him with glory and honour (Tehillim 8:3-5). Bereishit 1 is, however, only one side of the complex biblical equation. It is balanced by a narrative, quite different in tone, in Bereishit 2, in which the first man is set in the garden of Eden ‘to…
…saw, for the first time in all of history, a group of people, a massive group of people, eventually more than a million in number, following the first imperative of Jewry of all time, “lech lecha me’artzecha umimoladetecha umibeit avicha” (Bereishit 12:1), leaving behind their land, their home, their father’s house, and coming to live in a country at war…
…people.'” It conflicts with the promise, made repeatedly in the book of Bereishit, that through the covenantal people all the families, or nations, of the earth will be blessed. There is a mystery here that our age calls on us to decipher. What is the telos, the point of Jewish existence? What, in a global context, does it mean to…