D'var Torah in a Minute

The ancient world saw a natural connection between temporal and spiritual leadership. In some societies, the roles of king and high priest were one and the same, and even where there was a division, the king still wielded divine authority as either the descendant of the gods or as their personal representative - something which even lasted into the twentieth century, with the Emperor of Japan only repudiating his alleged descent from the goddess Amaterasu in 1946 (the exact meaning of the Humanity Declaration is rather unclear and outside the purview of this blog, but the Showa Emperor did declare that he was not a divine incarnation). This wasn't the case for the Israelites.  In this week's parashah, Moses is given instruction about making priestly vestments for Aaron and his sons and for the ceremony in which they are to be ordained as the priests. Even with their new office conferring religious power as the administrators of the sacrificial cult, Aaron and his descendants do...

This week, we begin the second half of the Book of Exodus, which will concern itself with the construction and consecration of the Tabernacle. Parashat Terumah is a portion that really embodies the expression "a picture is worth a thousand words." In this week's reading, God instructs Moses about how to design and build the Tabernacle where the Divine Presence will reside among the Israelites. In verse 8, after having given Moses the list of materials he should collect from the Israelites, God tells Moses, "[the Israelites] shall build me a sanctuary, and I shall dwell within them." Linguistically, this is an interesting choice of wording, as the word God uses, "mikdash" (from the root for "holy"), is not generally used to refer to the Tabernacle which is being described. When applied to the site of worship in the Israelite camp, that word is only used for the inner sanctum containing the Ark of the Covenant, where God's literal presence ...

Last week, I told a story from the Talmud about Moses being shown the school of Rabbi Akiva and how he derived meaning from the individual letters in the Torah. This week, that's precisely what we are going to do. Parashat Mishpatim represents a break from the narrative of the Israelites journeying through the desert on their way to the Promised Land. Moses is still at the base of the mountain, preparing to ascend to receive the Torah and the physical Tablets (the appearance of the Ten Commandments in last week's reading is God speaking the commandments to the assembled nation. Moses will only come down with the tablets in a couple weeks), and God starts listing off civil laws which Moses is to teach the people. The first letter in this parashah is doing a lot of heavy lifting. The letter vav, when used as a prefix, can play a lot of different roles in Biblical Hebrew. It can serve to change a verb from the perfect to the imperfect tense and vice versa, it can introduce an expl...

After five months, we've finally reached the climax of the birth story of the Jewish nation. This week, we find the Israelites camped at the foot of Mount Sinai, where Moses ascends to receive the Ten Commandments, and with them, the whole of the Torah. But you might ask, we are only halfway through the Torah, aren't we? Was Moses given information about the future, including his own death? We use the word Torah for a great many things, and what Moses brought down the mountain was more than just two stone tablets and more than just five books. In the final chapters of Deuteronomy, we get the description, set to music and taught to Jewish kids around the world, "Moses taught this Torah to us, the inheritance of the congregation of Jacob." It isn't clear what precisely the contents of the Written Torah were that were transmitted to Moses, with some interpretations holding that the narrative post-Sinai was added as it happened, our tradition holds that Moses was give...