A Quick Torah Thought

Whoever grew up being exhorted to eat the last scrap of food on his or her plate can surely appreciate the enigma in the sacrifice of the sin offering. Food left behind was called notar , leftovers - and had to be burned - and every earthenware vessel, anything that came out of the kiln, had to be broken into shards of clay and buried forevermore. Once and for all - you were not allowed to eat leftovers! - but even beyond that, there was mass wastefulness, perhaps millions of bowls, plates, anything earthenware that became no more valuable than disposables, designed for one-time usage.    Let's get the specifics: Here you are, and you unwittingly commited a sin - it could happen to all of us (the Talmud talks about rabbis who erred, and even boasted, "Now, I'll have to bring a fat sin-offering") - and you've brought your sin offering; the offering was divided into two, parts consumed by the fire of the altar, and those which the Cohen ate. The Cohen took his food,...

As universally know, every sacrifice needs to be brought with salt. In fact, there is even something covenantal about salt. The question I would like to ask is what exactly is covenantal about salt.  Firstly, the verse, which depicts how the grain-based meal offering served as an exemplar of all offerings:  "You shall season your every offering of meal with salt; you shall not omit from your meal offering the salt of your covenant with God; with all your offerings you must offer salt." Salt is oft-seen as primordial in nature, a world of dessication, dehydration leaving precious salts and minerals behind. In fact, the Midrash takes it a step further; God promised the primordial subterranean waters that they would be offered on the altar for libation, along with their complementary salts.  The struggle I have with this approach is that the Midrash, in its haggadic or illustrational form, seems to have no connection with the literary textual meaning of the Torah itself. Now...

Rashi makes a very insightful comment on the following verse in the Torah portion of Pekudei (39:1):  "Of the blue, purple, and crimson yarns they also made the service vestments for officiating in the sanctuary; they made Aaron’s sacral vestments—as Hashem had commanded Moses." Linen, Rashi writes, is not mentioned here, and in so far as we know that all of the sacred garments worn by the Cohen had woven linen, the vestments mentioned are NOT the clothing worn by the Cohen, but rather the coverings used for the sacred vessels in the temple.  What Rashi writes seems on the one hand to contradict what the verse itself says - vestments, or more simply, "clothing" usually refers to a garment donned by a person, and furthermore, the latter part of the verse explicitly states, "made Aaron’s sacral vestments," which obviously connotes the clothing actually worn by Aharon.  Thus, it would seem like a misnomer, or purposefully misleading - in the same verse - to s...

I distinctly remember getting a check in the mail prominently signed by the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, a check that was accompanied by a letter touting the president's personal concern, and desire to offer each individual aid in light of the crippling economic fallout from the Corona crisis. At the time, I couldn't help smirk inside, for two reasons: the letter very much made it seem that the aid was coming directly from Trump himself, a product of his munificence, care and unprecedented largesse, and secondly, Trump didn't seem to care very much about Corona as long as it didn't hurt his re-election prospects.  Now, fast-forward to Parshat Vayakhel. The Midrash seems to struggle with the fact that the signatory of the Aron, that would house the holy and inimitable tablets, the luchot was Betzalel, and not Moshe. And the Midrash struggles with that, the same way were the name at the end of the bombastic letter from the U.S. Treasury to not be Trump...

What seems to craft leaders - and nations - more than anything else is the association they have to time. The Jewish people's first mitzvah centered around time; having been enslaved for generations, as a free people, the first commandment they received centered around the recognition of time, the sanctification of the new month. After all, only a free people, with time that is truly their own, can autonomously choose how to use their time, and record it in a way that adds substance, and meaning, without which it cannot be sanctified.  Likewise for leaders, the test of time - and the ability to wait - are an everpresent gauge of their ability to lead, not just in a humane way but in one that conforms to the model designed by God. For Moshe, the sign that Hashem would truly lead his people out of slavery was that after all the miracles, and accompanying trials and tribulations, personal and national, that he, Moshe, would, over a year later return to the site of the burning bush, an...