Weekly Torah Reading

A note to subscribers: Last week, a new book of mine was published, The Great Shift: Encountering God in Biblical Times. I feel a little sheepish about including an announcement of it with my regular comment on the weekly Torah …

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Moses Didn’t Want to Die   In this week’s Torah reading, God instructs Moses that the time has come for him to die—in fact, He says this more than once. The reading opens with Moses relating that “the Lord said …

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By the Book   This week’s reading contains a curious provision. Moses instructs the Israelites that as soon as they cross the Jordan River to enter their future homeland, they are to write down the words of “this Torah” on …

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Every Day Is Labor Day   This weekend (running over into Monday), Americans will be celebrating Labor Day, the annual occasion established in the late 1800s to celebrate the labor movement in the United States. (Elsewhere in the world, May …

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Kings, Think Twice!    “The ancient Near East,” wrote the Egyptologist Henri Frankfort, “considered kingship the very basis of civilization. Only savages could live without a king. Security, peace, and justice could not prevail without a ruler to champion them. …

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Children of God   This week’s reading contains an odd injunction: “You are children of the Lord your God,” it says, “You shall not gash yourselves or shave the front of your heads for the dead.” (Deut 14:1). Ancient scholars …

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Eat What I Say   The expression “Not by bread alone” has certainly gotten around: it is, among other things, the name of a website promoting a farmer’s market in Green Bay, Wisconsin; the title of a Russian novel by …

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The Real Shema   According to a rabbinic tradition, when the “men of Jericho” recited the Shema, they would say it in a slightly different way from that followed by Jews nowadays. They would recite the first verse, “Hear O …

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