There are no paragraph breaks in the Parasha. It’s one long story of Yaakov leaving and then returning. He journeys out on orders from his parents and then, 148 verses later, comes back home. There are many episodes within this long story. Normally, I would concentrate on one of these episodes -- on the angels on the ladder, on the birth of the children, on the confrontation with Lavan. But sometimes...Read more...
We read this morning that “Isaac planted in that land, and reaped a hundredfold that year.”
Last week we read “And Isaac went out to the field and he saw a caravan approaching.”
As head of school of our local Orthodox day school, SPHDS, there are a lot of things that I do which you’d expect the head of school to do such as make
educational and religious policy...Read more...
A word in Hebrew: Nichush. In modern Hebrew, it means “to guess.” This is distantly related to what it means in the Chumash. The Torah forbids one to follow signs, as in trying to divine the future. One is not allowed to say, “if a bird chirps outside my window in the morning, then I’ll sell all of my stocks.”
There are those who say that Nichush is what...Read more...
Every year, sometimes at this time of year but not necessarily, there appears an exposition of the life of Avraham Avinu in which he’s a mess up. Rather than the man Kierkegaard called the Knight of Faith, he’s a failure. It can be that he mishandled his wife in Egypt, or that he was too cruel to Yishmael and Hagar, or that the Akeida is a fiasco.
