“Everything is in the hands of Heaven except for reverence of Heaven” (Babylonian Talmud, tractate Berachot, 33b) In his commentary of this week’s portion, Lech Lecha, Avraham Burg takes issue with the concept of faith. Weaving together late antiquity Midrash, Maimonides and his own hermeneutics, Burg charts his namesake, the original Abraham, as he who…
Abraham and Isaac — or, as some would have it, Ibrahim and Ishmael — took center stage when a panel including Muslim imams and some of America’s most prominent Modern Orthodox rabbis discussed their respective legal systems and foundational texts, and their implications for Jewish-Muslim relations today. The October 30 seminar “Ancient Texting” brought together…
What if Noah had been an exemplary spiritual leader and not just, as the Torah tells us, a righteous person by the standards of his own generation? Picture Noah as a true prophet of his time, a man who knows that God is about to destroy the world. Such a person would have done far…
Genesis 5:9–11:32 For years I was extremely critical of Noah. I didn’t like his silent character, his failure to open his mouth, to utter even a single word of protest as God stormed across the world in his murderous, watery rage. Unlike Abraham at Sodom, unlike Moses facing the sin of the Golden Calf. I…
Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah as Written Tradition in Medieval Jewish Cultures By Talya Fishman University of Pennsylvania Press, 424 pages, $65 Basic to Jewish religious teaching is the distinction between “written” Torah — Scripture, the Jewish Bible — and so-called “oral” Torah, a diffuse tradition of legal and homiletic rabbinic commentary…
One of the great joys of my life is in the study of Jewish texts. Every time I read one, even if the story is familiar to me, I am grateful to be part of a religion that rewards questioning and debate and has such a rich literature that you can mine its depths again…
Genesis 1:1–5:8 He Created Man: Male and Female And so we take in again from the top: “In the beginning….” Bear this in mind: Jewish time is not linear – not in the sad, fatalistic sense of the word. Nor is it circular, coming back around upon itself with depressing regularity. Jewish time is a…
More and more in our generation the Torah is claimed as the domain of a select few, whose interpretations are said to be authoritative for all. Avraham Burg reveals a new way of interpreting the weekly Torah reading, which seeks to return the Torah to its rightful owners – all of us. Written from a…
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