A repeated theme in yesterday’s Torah reading is the instruction that we are to walk in God’s ways – understood by our sages as a commandment to imitate God’s attributes as they define them: “Just as He is merciful so must you be merciful, just as He is gracious so must you be gracious”. As Judaism Reclaimed explores, this is a perplexing idea – particularly from the Rambam’s perspective what does it mean to mimic a deity which is understood to be beyond comparison and cannot even be described in human language?
Tuesday 24 September 2024
The confusing command to "walk in God's ways"
Monday 16 September 2024
Rebellious sons and a radical rabbinic tradition
Near the start of yesterday’s Torah reading we find the strange commandment of ben sorer umoreh (wayward and rebellious son), the rabbinic interpretation of which serves only to intensify its perplexity:
If one of his parents had a hand cut off, or was lame, mute, blind or deaf, he cannot become a “wayward and rebellious son”, because it says “his father and mother shall take hold of him”—not those with a hand cut off; “and bring him out”—not parents who are lame; “and they shall say”—and not parents who are mute; “this our son”—and not parents who are blind; “he will not obey our voice”—and not parents who are deaf.
“How do we know it of all other things? We infer them from the vineyard: just as regarding the vineyard its produce grows from the earth, and once it is ripe the labourer may eat of it, so too everything which grows from the soil and is ripe, the labourer may eat from…”
Tuesday 10 September 2024
Navigating the stormy seas of aggadah
Following dozens of pages of often complex and intricate legal analysis, Daf Yomi devotees might think they have earned some form of respite with the entertaining somewhat peculiar aggadic anecdotes recounted by Rabbah bar bar Channah. In truth, however, these aggadot present their own special set of challenges.
Rabbah [bar bar Chana] said: “Those who go down to sea told me that the wave which sinks a ship appears to have a fringe of white fire at its tip. But when one strikes it with a club upon which is engraved “Ehyeh asher Ehyeh…’, it subsides…”Once we were going in a ship and we saw a certain fish. Sand settled on its back and a meadow sprouted upon it. We thought it was dry land and we went up and dwelled there and we baked and cooked on it. When its back became hot it turned over and, if not for the fact that the ship was nearby, we would have drowned.
Wednesday 4 September 2024
The excruciating question of hostage negotiation
In dark times such as these, many of us find ourselves looking back to precedents from our tear-stained history for guidance and insight. What we find is not always clear and unambiguous, but even then it can provide a measure of perspective and comfort to know that our desperate struggles and moral quandaries are similar to those which our ancestors have faced over the millennia.
Reasons for mitzvot: the hidden and revealed
In one particularly mysterious verse from yesterday’s Torah reading we are told “The hidden matters are for Hashem our God, and the revealed...
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Shmuli Phillips is with Ethan Yakhin . Fasten your seatbelts for a thrilling high-speed roller-coaster ride through sensitive topics such ...
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Nechemiah’s description of the Sukkot celebration as something that “the Children of Israel had not done so since the days of Yehoshua bin N...