The most surprising best-selling book in 2014 was French economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century[1] – a dense 700-page-long treatise on economic theory backed by massive statistical research – not the usual stuff of runaway literary successes. Much of its appeal was the way it documented the phenomenon that is reshaping societies throughout the world: in the current…
Happiness, said Aristotle, is the ultimate good at which all humans aim.[1] But in Judaism it is not necessarily so. Happiness is a high value. Ashrei, the closest Hebrew word to happiness, is the first word of the book of Psalms. We say the prayer known as Ashrei three times each day. We can surely endorse the phrase in the…
I argued in my Covenant and Conversation for parshat Kedoshim that Judaism is more than an ethnicity. It is a call to holiness. In one sense, however, there is an important ethnic dimension to Judaism. It is best captured in the 1980s joke about an advertising campaign in New York. Throughout the city there were giant posters with the slogan,…
…happening. God then institutes a new order. Act 4 begins with an account of this order, which is unprecedentedly long, extending from Exodus 35, through the whole of the book of Vayikra and the first ten chapters of Bamidbar. The nature of this new order is that God becomes not merely the director of history and the giver of laws….
…kodesh (Vayikra 23:24). It is a moment of commemoration or remembrance of teruah, the particular sound that we call teruah, and later in Bamidbar, uvachodesh hashevi’i be’echad lachodesh (Bamidbar 29:1), “on the first day of the seventh month,” mikra kodesh… kol melechet avodah… yom teruah yihyeh lachem, “it should be a day of making this sound.” So Rosh Hashanah is…
…need that shock to help them change their lives. VAYAKHEL & PEKUDEI: The highest achievement is not self-expression but self-limitation: making space for something other and different from us. FROM THE BOOK OF VAYIKRA: VAYIKRA: For each of us God has a task. Discerning that task, hearing God’s call, is what gives a life meaning and purpose. TZAV: The more…
…‘Moshe was not your son, yet you called him your son. You are not My daughter, but I shall call you My daughter.’” (Vayikra Raba 1:3) They added that she was one of the few people (tradition enumerates nine) who were so righteous that they entered paradise in their lifetime. Instead of “Pharaoh’s daughter” read “Hitler’s daughter” or “Stalin’s daughter”…
…they died. We then follow two conversations between Moshe and Aharon. The first: Moshe then said to Aharon, “This is what the Lord spoke of when He said, ‘Among those who are near to Me, I will show Myself holy; in the sight of all the people I will be honoured.’” Aharon remained silent. (Vayikra 10:3) Moshe then commanded their…
…l-m-d, meaning to learn or teach. The verb does not appear even once in Bereishit, Shemot, Vayikra, or Bamidbar. In Devarim it appears seventeen times. There was nothing like this concern for universal education elsewhere in the ancient world. Jews became the people whose heroes were teachers, whose citadels were schools, and whose passion was study and the life of…
…lechatchilah, meaning, an after-the-fact concession, second-best, not ideal or something desired at the outset. A third interpretation is that the entire sequence of events from Shemot 25 to Vayikra 25 was a response to the episode of the Golden Calf. This mistake, I believe, represented a passionate need on the part of the people to have God close not distant,…