The Parsha in a Nutshell In Va’era, the story of the exodus begins in earnest, with an unprecedented series of divine interventions into history. Time and again plagues hit the Egyptians. Moshe repeatedly asks Pharaoh to release the people. Repeatedly, Pharaoh refuses. An immense drama is taking place. All the power of imperial Egypt is powerless against the God of…
Jobbik, otherwise known as the Movement for a Better Hungary, is an ultra-nationalist Hungarian political party that has been described as fascist, neo-Nazi, racist, and antisemitic. It has accused Jews of being part of a “cabal of western economic interests” attempting to control the world: the libel otherwise known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fiction created…
…Their southern counterparts may have been familiar with Sufism, the mystical movement in Islam. The ambivalence of Jews towards the life of self-denial may therefore lie in the suspicion that it entered Judaism from the outside. There were ascetic movements in the first centuries of the Common Era in both the West (Greece) and the East (Iran) that saw the…
…of the sublime. The psychologist Abraham Maslow, whom we encountered in parshat Va’era, spoke about “peak experiences,” and saw them as the essence of the spiritual encounter. But how do you feel the presence of God in the midst of everyday life? Not from the top of Mount Sinai but from the plain beneath? Not when it is surrounded by…
Mark Twain said it most pithily: When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years. Whether Freud was right or wrong about the Oedipus complex, there…
…ideas from a personal vantage point. This concept is a core value of Judaism, and is one of the explanations for the miraculous history of Jewish continuity against all the odds. However, that is not to say that this is obvious for an adolescent and an easy value to connect to, especially as it demands sacrifice and difficult life choices….
…person to have achieved a non-anthropocentric, God’s-eye-view of creation, was Job in chs. 38-41 of the book that bears his name. DISCUSSION QUESTIONS FOR VAYECHI Why can’t there be both truth and peace simultaneously? Are these values always at odds? Do you agree peace is more important than truth? Can we conclude that peace is the ultimate value in Judaism?…
…Ruth Benedict, to explain the Japanese to them, which she did. After the war, she published her ideas in a book, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.[2] One of her central insights was the difference between shame cultures and guilt cultures. In shame cultures the highest value is honour. In guilt cultures it is righteousness. Shame is feeling bad that we…
There is an old saying that what makes God laugh is seeing our plans for the future.[1] However, if Tanach is our guide, what makes God laugh is human delusions of grandeur. From the vantage point of heaven, the ultimate absurdity is when humans start thinking of themselves as godlike. There are several pointed examples in the Torah. One whose…
…And that is precisely how the Sages understood it. And this is source 11, and I’m not going to take you through it, you’ll read it another time. I’m going to paraphrase it. You remember how the story of creation goes, vayomer Elokim yehi, “and God said, let there be,” vayehi,”and there was” vayar Elokim ki tov, “and God saw…