Inside Parsha

It’s popular to “take a stand” these days, particularly when one is advocating a stance which meets the approval of the masses. It’s considerably harder to maintain a position which runs against the grain of one’s society. Jewish people have always been rebels, the Torah was and remains an iconoclastic work which has always created a tension between its adherents and the prevailing cultures. A friend of mine once expressed it thus: to be an Orthodox Jew one must feel some degree of tension between your lifestyle and that of society. If you don’t, you are either entirely cut off from the outside world, or you have long abandoned authentic Jewish values. Prior to leaving Egypt, our ancestors were commanded to take a sheep and slaughter it as a sacrifice. In preparation, they needed to bring the sheep into their possession four days prior to the Exodus. The notion of ‘four days of preparation’ features on a number of occasions in Torah to denote a premeditated and resolute b

Is time-travel possible? I firmly believe it is, but not in the sci-fi sense. It is only a more primitive notion of time-travel that conjures images of people from the future entering strange looking vehicles which deftly pop them into alternate ages. The time-travel that I’m thinking of, is the kind you experience when enjoying a good novel or film, whose opening scenes are opaque at first, but become crystal clear once specific information has been revealed. The reader/viewer is tempted to revisit the story a second time, to appreciate new meanings with the ‘aha’ that they have now earned. Perspective changes the past. Understanding the underlying motives, can reshape an act perceived as malicious into one that can be appreciated as love. A hard teacher or a stern parent, can, with the passage of time be re-viewed as an enlightened pedagogue with a true understanding of their mentee’s long-term needs. Which leads me to a fascinating nuance in Rashi’s commentary on the w