Ki teitzei—“when you go out.” The portion opens with a man going out to war, and then, as though the going-out had unlatched a door, it pours forth the most crowded body of law in the Torah: return your neighbor’s stray ox, do not yoke an ox and a donkey to the same plow, do
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You cross the threshold. Before you have heard a word of the sermon, before you have opened a text, before anyone has said anything to you, the argument has already been made. It is in the stone above the door you just walked through. It is in the glass that filters the light you are
I am at the Abbey of Gethsemani, a Trappist monastery in the Kentucky hill country. I arrived yesterday afternoon with no itinerary beyond the days themselves—mostly because I needed to be somewhere that was not anywhere I had already been. I’ve attended several of the services since arriving; the monks gather seven times a day, plus
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A river runs past a stone and past the bank on the same day, at the same volume, carrying the same load of silt. Give it a century. The stone is smaller and smoother than it was, its edges gone, its surface polished along the line the water travels. The bank is not there at
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The portion opens by commanding a world of gates. Shoftim ve-shotrim titen lecha be-khol she’arecha—“judges and officers you shall appoint in all your gates”. From that first verse Shoftim assembles the most complete apparatus of accountability in the Torah. Courts and their appeals. A king bound beneath a book of the law, forbidden to multiply
A politician speaks of globalists manipulating the world’s financial systems. A celebrity warns that a small, coordinated group controls the banks, the media, and the government. A social-media graphic circulates widely, depicting puppet strings attached to a recognizable Jewish name. The language feels contemporary. The accusation is not. Its essential structure—a small, foreign, financially capable
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Behold, I set before you today a blessing and a curse.— Deuteronomy 11:26 The imperative is singular. Re’eh—see, one person, singular—addressed to lifneichem, before you, plural. Moses is speaking to a nation and demanding something of each member of it individually, in the same breath. That grammatical seam is not incidental. It is the argument of
303 CE. Diocletian issues the first of four edicts ordering the persecution of Christians throughout the Roman Empire. Churches are to be destroyed. Scriptures are to be burned. Clergy are to be imprisoned. Those who refuse to sacrifice to Roman gods are to be executed. 313 CE. Constantine and Licinius issue the Edict of Milan,
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A friend, working through the phrase descent for the sake of ascent, asked a question that deserved a real answer rather than a reflexive one. Must the descent be chosen, deliberately undertaken, in order for the ascent to follow? What does the phrase actually mean? And underneath both questions, the one that mattered most: is this
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V’zacharta et kol haderech asher holichecha Hashem Elokecha zeh arba’im shanah bamidbar, lema’an anotcha lenasotcha lada’at et asher bilvavecha—And you shall remember the entire way that the L-rd your G-d led you these forty years in the wilderness, to afflict you, to test you, to know what is in your heart.— Deuteronomy 8:2 Idiomatically, Eikev means “because.” Rashi, opening
