…The flute would continue playing until the procession reached the Temple Mount. There, they would each place their basket of fruit on their shoulder – the Mishnah says that even King Agrippa would do so – and carry it to the Temple forecourt. There the Levites would sing (Psalm 30:2), “I will praise you, God, for you have raised me…
…parsha, and the other in Deuteronomy in the parsha of Ki Tavo. Only these speak about a time when Israel is exiled and dispersed, scattered, as Moses later put it, “to the most distant lands under heaven.” (Deut. 30:4) There are three major differences between the two curses, however. The passage in Leviticus is in the plural, that in Deuteronomy…
…Where our speaking…meets God’s listening – Preparing for the New Year (a 3 min video from the Rosh Hashanah series) Is Our Most Famous Prayer a Prayer? (29 min Talmud Talk) Further articles Be Silent and Listen (Covenant & Conversation, Ki Tavo) Isaac and Prayer (Covenant & Conversation, Chayei Sarah) Jacob’s Ladder and the Structure of Jewish Prayer (Covenant &…
A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible I Believe is a personal and intimate demonstration of how Rabbi Sacks came to see the world through listening attentively to the Torah and its message for the present and all times. This is the latest book in the Covenant & Conversation series of themed books, written by Rabbi Sacks on the weekly Torah portion. The…
It remains one of the most counterintuitive passages in all of religious literature. Moses is addressing the Israelites just days before their release. They have been exiles for 210 years. After an initial period of affluence and ease, they have been oppressed, enslaved, and their male children killed in an act of slow genocide. Now, after signs and wonders and…
By making the Israelites a nation of storytellers, Moses helped turn them into a people bound by collective responsibility – to one another, to the past and future, and to God. By framing a narrative that successive generations would make their own and teach to their children, Moses turned Jews into a nation of leaders….
Narrative is at the heart of covenantal politics because it locates national identity in a set of historic events. The memory of those events evokes the values for which those who came before us fought and of which we are the guardians….
Jews were the first people to find God in history. They were the first to think in historical terms – of time as an arena of change as opposed to cyclical time in which the seasons rotate, people are born and die, but nothing really changes. Jews were the first people to write history – many centuries before Herodotus and…
I believe that listening is one of the greatest arts. It opens us to God, our fellow humans, and the beauties of nature. For me one of the gifts of this strange, difficult time has been the ability to slow down the prayers so that I am able to listen to them speaking to me. Praying is as much about…