Parashat Ha Shavua Commentaries

It is a truism of human nature that we often denigrate our own abilities while extolling those of the generations before us.  Our grandparents appear to us as giants, perhaps a reflection of our size relative to them when we were infants, but also because we are able to look on the challenges of their age from the perspective of the passage of time.  Events in the past look bigger, more romantic, more heroic than the puny happenings of the present.  It is no surprise, then, that ancestor worship is so common to the peoples of the earth, and that even secular America treats th Read more...

One of the central dilemmas challenging modern men and women is that we turn for comfort and purpose to faiths whose central tenants we often find too simplistic or downright unacceptable.  Even as we affirm the importance of being Jewish, even as we struggle to support Jewish education and to transmit Jewish identity, we harbor our own doubts--not just about peripheral details of Jewish life, but about the very core of our ancestral faith.  How can we believe in a Creation of the world when we have seen the overwhelming and meticulous evidence for a Big Bang and for evolution?&nb Read more...

In a society that values the rugged individual, the go-it-alone type, above all else, it is often hard to fathom the biblical-rabbinic commitment to the community and to the people as a whole. We moderns are so used to elevating our own concerns above that over the society, to pursuing our private happiness, even when at the expense of others and of our planet, that we look with horror on any assertions of the priority of the communal and the shared. Read more...

This week’s Torah portion, in part because of its name and in part because it spans the majority of the portion, is best known for the story of Noah and the flood that God caused to rain down for forty days and forty nights.  Yet, there is another brief, yet also well-known narrative in this week’s Torah reading that comes just following the account of Noah. Read more...

In recording the ten generations separating Adam to Noah, the Torah provides brief encapsulations of their lives. By far the most intriguing on the list is Hanokh (in English, he is referred to as Enoch), the seventh generation of humanity. Here is the complete record of what the Torah reveals about Hanokh: Read more...