The Torah here in this week’s reading, mandates a specific “place” where the Israelites were to sacrifice to God. Originally whenever anyone wanted to eat meat they had to bring it to the sanctuary where it was sacrificed, its blood, fats and inedible parts removed and then divided up between the owners and the priests. During the wilderness period the…
Author: Jeremy Rosen
Paganism
So much of this week’s reading is devoted to warning the Children of Israel not to follow the religion and fashions of the Canaanites they were coming to displace. The Israelite mission was to live a considered, thoughtful life, not the random, superstitious, loose and indulgent life of the pagans. What characterized Canaanite paganism was the disguising of one’s true…
Blessings and Curses
This week’s reading from Torah starts with an amazing statement, that the Torah can be both a source of blessing and a curse. Surely that can’t be correct. If one keeps the Torah there cannot be any way in which it can be bad. And yet the fact is that Torah can be misused and abused. The Torah is great.…
Sweat the Little Stuff
The Torah continues, this week, with Moshe’s long oration to the Children of Israel before he dies. In it he highlights the issues that he thinks are going to lead to a loss of faith and the danger that they might abandon their faith. Without someone as strong as he was to keep them together and to impose discipline, he…
Reward & Punishment
“If you obey my commands…then I will send the rains in good time.” The Second Paragraph of the Shema implies a direct correlation between keeping God’s commandments and being rewarded with the world’s bounty and thriving. Conversely, betraying God brings about destruction and the failure of the physical world to produce food. On a rational level this does not make…
Depopulation
There are different attitudes to be found in Devarim itself in regard towards the Canaanites. On the one hand in Chapter 7 it says that the Israelites must destroy the Seven Canaanite nations completely and not intermarry with them. Well, if you destroy them then of course you cannot intermarry. But then in Chapter8 Moshe says that God will not…