Therefore whoever hears these sayings of Mine, and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock: and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it did not fall, for it was founded on the rock. But everyone […]
Seu et rosh kol adat b’nei Yisrael—Lift the head of the entire congregation of Israel… — Numbers 1:2 Bamidbar has always been the portion the rabbis work hardest to redeem. Open it and you find numbers—a great many of them. Six hundred three thousand five hundred fifty men of fighting age, distributed across twelve tribes, each
Sickness Unto Life ended with a river and a canoe and a paddle. The current of despair is navigable—not by eliminating it, not by pretending it isn’t there, but by feeling it without surrendering to it, by letting it inform without letting it direct. That is the argument the previous essay made, and it stands. But
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Im bechukotai telechu v’et mitzvotai tishm’ru va’asitem otam—If you walk in My statutes and keep My commandments and do them… — Leviticus 26:3 Before he could receive what was waiting for him, one instruction had to be followed. Not a commandment. Not a teaching. A removal. Remove your sandals, for the place where you are standing is
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Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’
You shall sanctify the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land for all its inhabitants. It shall be a Jubilee for you, and you shall return, each person to his holding and each person to his family. —Leviticus 25:10 The portion opens on a mountain and immediately makes a claim so radical that the
There is a particular kind of suffering that has no obvious cause. The body is intact. The material conditions of life are met. Nothing has gone catastrophically wrong in any way that can be pointed to and named. And yet something is profoundly, persistently wrong—a wrongness that sits at the center of the self and
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Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles? Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad
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Speak to the Israelites and say to them: These are My appointed times, the appointed times of YHVH, which you shall proclaim as holy convocations.—Leviticus 23:2 The word “holiday” is “holy day” with the holiness worn smooth. At some point the compression happened—two words became one, the sacred qualifier dissolved into the secular noun, and
There is a diagram that appears on the walls of synagogues, in the margins of medieval manuscripts, in the notebooks of mystics, and increasingly on the screens of people who encountered it through a passing reference and found themselves unable to stop thinking about it. It is called the Tree of Life. It consists of
Kabbalah 101: The Grammar of Emanation Read More »
