Jonathan Sacks
ARTICLES BY: Jonathan Sacks
Holiness and Childbirth
The sidrot (Torah portions) of Tazria and Metsorah contain laws which are among the most difficult to understand. They are about conditions of "impurity" arising...
Fire: Holy and Unholy
The shock is immense. For several weeks and many chapters - the longest prelude in the Torah - we have read of the...
Violence and the Sacred
Judaism is less a philosophical system than a field of tensions - between universalism and particularism, for example, or exile and redemption, priests...
Between Destiny and Chance
The third book of the Torah is known in English as "Leviticus", a word deriving from Greek and Latin, meaning, "pertaining to the ...
Three Types of Community
A long drama had taken place. Moses had led the people from slavery to the beginning of the road to freedom. The people themselves...
Two Types of Religious Encounter
Framing the epic events of this week's sedra (Bible portion) are two objects - the two sets of tablets, the first given before, the...
Prophet and Priest
The sedra (bible portion) of Tetsaveh, as commentators have noted, has one unusual feature: it is the only sedra from the beginning of Shemot...
The Building of the Tabernacle and the Jewish Ethnogenesis
As soon as we read the opening lines of Terumah we begin the massive shift from the intense drama of the exodus with its...
In The Details
On the opening phrase of Mishpatim [Judgements]- "And these are the laws you are to set before them" - Rashi comments: "And these are the...
The Politics of Revelation
The revelation at Mount Sinai - the central episode not only of the parshah of Yitro, but of Judaism as a whole - was unique...
To be a Leader of the Jewish People
"That day, G-d saved Israel from the hands of the Egyptians . . . The Israelites saw the great power G-d had displayed against...
Freedom’s Defense
And you shall explain to your child on that day, 'It is because of what the Lord did for me when I went free from Egypt'. It...
Of Lice and Men
Throughout all Egypt the dust turned into lice. But when the magicians tried to produce lice by their secret arts, they could not....
Who is a Jewish Leader?
The sedra (Bible portion) of Shemot, in a series of finely etched vignettes, paints a portrait of the life of Moses, culminating in the moment...
