David Curzon
By David Curzon
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Culture In Praise of Dissembling
Deuteronomy 22:1-3 contains the admirable commandment to return your neighbor’s lost property. At the end of 22:3 we have the following isolated clause, preceded by a colon in the King James and by a semicolon in the Jewish Publication Society 1917 translations: thou mayest not hide thyself Everett Fox concurs, offering, after a colon, “you…
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Culture Anna Kamienska in The Wilderness
The wilderness in the Torah is both a geographic place and a figurative region. Moses, in the first chapter of Deuteronomy, speaking “to all Israel,” recapitulates the journeys they have taken. He reminds them that God, condemning the generation that came out of Egypt, told them to turn back from the Promised Land after the…
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Culture The Logic of Religious Images
Close to the end of this week’s portion is the injunction (Leviticus 26:1), “You shall not make idols for yourselves.” The Jewish Study Bible (Oxford University Press, 2004) annotates this by referring the reader back to an earlier verse (25:42) on the freeing of Hebrew slaves in the jubilee year, which is required because “they…
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News In Praise of Impurity
A priestly revulsion against the body in general and bodily fluids in particular seems to lie behind many of the laws in Leviticus. This week’s portion, for example, records laws for controlling defilement caused by corpses, “an eruption or discharge” and “an emission of semen.” There are also prohibitions concerning a man who has “a…
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Culture Controlling The Uncontrollable
This week’s portion, Tazria, is primarily concerned with the priestly rituals for dealing with the outbreak of macabre changes in the skin and flesh. The commentary in “The Jewish Study Bible” (Oxford University Press, 2004 tells us that “Tzara’at, seen as a gradual erosion of the skin, was thought to culminate, unless the patient recovered,…
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Culture The Central Message
Every year at this time in the annual cycle of readings, we are confronted with seemingly endless descriptions of cultic practices, often involving the slaughter of animals, that are for most of us at worst abhorrent and at best — the presentation of bread and cake to God — absurd. Let me try to put…
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Culture Don’t Mention His Weight Problem
Joseph’s interpretations of Pharaoh’s two dreams are, from an objective viewpoint, implausible. Both dreams are, in their essence, about fatness and thinness and eating. Applying Freudian principles of dream interpretation, we can assume that Pharaoh had been preoccupied, during the day leading up to the night of the dreams, though probably not fully consciously, with…
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Culture Nodding Off on Wedlock’s Bed
This week’s portion contains Jacob’s dream and many other passages that have given rise to midrashim. One of these passages is Genesis 30:1: And when Rachel saw that she bore Jacob no children, Rachel envied her sister; and she said unto Jacob: ‘Give me children or else I die.’ Robert Burns (1759-1796) was inspired by…
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