A Quick Torah Thought

There are many delineations in this week's parsha of different types of properties, from Levite cities, properties inside walled cities, and those abutting one's ancestral lands.  The one I'd like to focus on as a primer for understanding the others is property situated inside of a walled city, mainly because of its exceptional status vis a vis redemption. Unlike the typical real estate property that is sold, a walled city has special status, more specifically that once a property therein is sold it does not return to the initial owner in the Jubilee year. The first owner only has one year to redeem it, and after that, loses any chance to do so.  Typically, at those times, the societal hierarchy would live in cities; furthermore, given that cities cropped up around water sources so as to protect them, therefore the lands therein were considered to have more of a communal nature, combining, synthesizing and integrating the needs of the populace as a whole. In stark contradis...

There are few topics in the Torah that baffle me as much as how the Torah views handicap. Every year I re-read the Torah's prohibition on service on the part of priests, or Kohanim in the Beit Hamikdash. The prohibition is a blanket one, and uncategorical; no one who has one of the listed physical ailments, all of which are visible to the naked eye, can serve God on behalf of the Jewish people. They are not allowed to enter certain areas, they cannot pour libations, or sprinkle blood on the altar. They cannot serve to effectuate the repentance, needed or sought, by the masses of the Jewish people. In a beit knesset I frequent on a weekly basis there is such a Kohen . I don't know the medical background or name for such a condition, but he has one leg that is far shorter than the next. He wears an elevated – platform – shoe, which enables him to walk, but when he walks he limps horribly, contorting his whole body with each step. Every day he does birkat ha'kohanim , i.e. th...

The commandment to love your fellow man as you love yourself is framed in a very interesting way, i.e. in the context of plans for retaliation. "You shall not take revenge or bear a grudge against members of your people. Love your fellow (Jew) as yourself." The sages teach that the context is one where you've been asked to pay another a kindness; in the first instance, i.e. taking revenge, you are asked to do a favor by someone who explicitly has refused to do one for you. Tit for tat, quid pro quo, you say no. Why should you help someone who doesn't help you? In the second, namely, bearing a grudge, you do do the other person a favor, but rub it in, saying, "I've helped you, even though you refused to help me!" It seems odd that it would be in this context that we are taught of brotherly love, compassion, giving, tolerance and kindness. After all, not every day are we asked for favors and loving your fellow man would seem to be a constant, somet...

One of the hardest things we face is change. It's rarely pleasant, and often requires paradigm shifts that mean re-examining our lives in ways that create new demands, admissions about the past, and a need to relate differently to either different people or things that were entrenched as a given in our lives.  The biblical exemplar of change could be said to be the experience of the leper, or a metzo r a , who either experiences bodily changes, his skin becoming blotched in different colors and hues, alternating textures, and protrusions, that concave in or out, or whose clothing itself becomes spotted, or whose walls overnight become blotched. For each of the above, there is a different purification process, making this one of the most abstruse topics in all of biblical literature. Priests were trained, and specialized in gauging and examining different shapes and hues, paying repeat home visits, and were essentially the biblical version of a modern day oncologist, the commonality...