Posts Tagged: Torah commentary
A Small Unified People Can Overcome Any Enemy
Buried inconspicuously in this week's parsha is a short sentence with explosive potential, causing us to think again about the nature of Jewish history and...
Sometimes True Change Takes Generations, Even With Great Leaders
Pinhas contains a mini-essay on leadership, as Moses confronts his own mortality and asks God to appoint a successor. The great leaders care about succession....
Leadership and Loyalty
Is leadership a set of skills, the ability to summon and command power? Or does it have an essentially moral dimension also? Can a bad...
The Power of Believing in Yourself
It was perhaps the single greatest collective failure of leadership in the Torah. Ten of the spies whom Moses had sent to spy out the...
The Power of Kindness and Caring
In Bechukotai, in the midst of one of the most searing curses ever to have been uttered to a nation by way of warning, the...
The Difference Between a Sprint and Marathon
It was a unique, unrepeatable moment of leadership at its highest height. For forty days Moses had been communing with God, receiving from him the...
The Sins of Leaders
Leaders make mistakes. That is inevitable. So, strikingly, our parsha implies. The real issue is how he or she responds to those mistakes. The point is...
Celebrating the Victories of Others
If leaders are to bring out the best in those they lead, they must give those people the chance to show they are capable of...
Judaism is About Taking Personal Responsibility
The sequence of parshiyot, Terumah, Tetzaveh, Ki Tissa, Vayakhel and Pekudei, is puzzling in many ways. First, it outlines the construction of the Tabernacle, the portable house...
Looking Up to the Hopeful Horizon
The Israelites had crossed the Red Sea. The impossible had happened. The mightiest army in the ancient world - the Egyptians with their horse-drawn chariots...
Real Leaders Focus on the Future and Education
To gain insight into the unique leadership lesson of this week's parsha, I often ask an audience to perform a thought-experiment. Imagine you are the...
The Price of Silence
In an earlier Covenant and Conversation, I quoted the Netziv (Naftali Zvi Yehudah Berlin, 1816-1893, dean of the yeshiva in Volozhin), who made the sharp observation...
Beginning the Journey
A while back, a British newspaper, The Times, interviewed a prominent member of the Jewish community - let's call him Lord X - on his 92nd...
New Take on Prophet Jeremiah Shows How Bible Ought to Be Read
JNS.org - This is the way the Bible ought to be read. In graduate schools and in theological seminaries, the Bible is usually read by...
