The palm, the citron, the myrtle, and the willow are not lifted when the first day of Sukkot falls on Shabbat, though in the Temple they were. The decree reaches the taking and leaves the dwelling untouched. What remains is the roof, the only surface with material requirements of its own.
The Shade and the Sign Read More »
Seneca marveled that people who fight over the boundary of their land let others trespass on their lives, even leading in those who will possess them. His subject was time; his image was a door. At the burning bush, Or HaChaim hears two instructions in what sounds like one.
Jonah runs because of what he knows, not what he doubts. The Zohar reads his descent into the ship as the soul’s descent into a body and the fish as the grave, and finds the turning at the bottom, before anything outside has changed.
At the Roots of the Mountains Read More »
Paris, January 1895. Soldiers tear the epaulettes from Alfred Dreyfus’s uniform and break his sword across their knee. Beyond the gates a crowd is screaming—not death to the traitor. He was a Polytechnique graduate on the General Staff, assimilated to the point of self-destruction. What exactly was he supposed to have converted out of?
The Secular Conversion Read More »
Shimon bar Yochai entered a cave to escape execution and came out able to set a field on fire with a look. What settled him was an old man running at dusk with two bundles of myrtle.
Eternal Life and Temporal Life Read More »
The face is hidden. Israel says so, and Israel is right about that. What they get wrong is the word in the middle: hidden, therefore gone. G-d predicts the sentence before anyone says it—and then answers it with a song, taught in Moab, before there was anything to argue against.
In 1523 he wrote that Jews were being treated as though they were dogs rather than human beings, and that a good Christian in their position might reasonably have refused the faith. In 1543 the same man wrote that their synagogues should be burned. The temptation is to call it a change of mind. Neither document supports that.
The Preacher’s Poison Read More »
The rains did not come. Rabbi Eliezer descended to the ark and recited all twenty-four blessings—the complete fast-day liturgy, every word the tradition prescribes for exactly this emergency. Nothing happened. Rabbi Akiva descended after him and said two sentences. The rain fell.
Nothing to Collect Read More »
Twice in one chapter Moses is told to make a witness. One is a scroll, handed to the priests and given a place beside the Ark. The other is a song, taught to the people and set into their mouths. Both are placed. Only one is promised it will still be there later.
Parashat Vayeilech Read More »
He has served no foreign god. He is standing in the assembly, hearing the covenant read aloud, and somewhere in the middle of it he blesses himself. Torah answers with a refusal of forgiveness it never issued at Sinai—and then never uses the word forgive again.
