Peretz Rodman
By Peretz Rodman
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Culture Divide and Concur
Although the portion is called simply Korah, the assault on Moses’ leadership was led by a coalition of opponents with different gripes and different goals. The portion begins with a list of the leaders: “Korah son of Yitzhar son of Kehat son of Levi, and Datan and Aviram sons of Eliav and On son of…
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Culture Treif Wasn’t Always Non-kosher
Of all the words contributed by the Yiddish language to modern American English, “kosher” is one of the more common — and, as a term neither coarse nor derisive, an exception to a general rule. American dictionaries frequently also list its antonym, treif (spelled with or without the “i”), defining it as “not kosher and…
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Culture The Day After Yom Kippur
Just last week, we were reading about an outrageous sin, the fashioning of a golden calf by Aaron the Priest, Moses’ brother. He did this at the behest of the nervous Israelites, whose anxiety was pushed beyond their tolerance limit by Moses’ long stay on Mount Sinai. The story of that manic insistence upon a…
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Culture Wealth and Strife: Can Rich Relatives Live Together?
Lot and Abram, nephew and uncle, had migrated together from Mesopotamia to Canaan, and from Canaan down to Egypt. Now they returned together from Egypt to Canaan. Here, after traveling a long and arduous path, side by side, they reached a parting of the ways. Both men, the Torah tells us, had attained wealth. “Abram…
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Culture Avoiding the Curses
Who will get the sixth aliya at your synagogue this Sabbath? It is usually an uncomplicated business to distribute among those present the honor of pronouncing the blessings over each of the seven-plus-one segments of the public recitation of the week’s Torah portion. The assignments are made to honor guests, recognize members’ celebratory events or…
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Culture Settling in Transjordan
Imagine yourself as the director of a play or film with Numbers 32 as your script. What instructions do you give to the actors playing the men of the tribes of Reuven and Gad as they rehearse the scene in which they inform Moses of their desire to settle in Transjordan, short of the final…
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Culture Value: More Than a Matter of Money
‘She’s worth her weight in gold.” “You look like a million dollars.” Our language often attributes measurable monetary value to human beings. In a world in which these were not merely figures of speech, what would be the actual worth of a human being? How could one tell? Who would decide? In the first eight…
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News It’s Not About You
Most of us have learned to be wary of people who offer us too many reasons to do what they want us to do. If my children list five different reasons why I need to drive over to the shopping district, I suspect that a sixth reason lurks behind them all: their “need” to rent…
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