Posts Tagged: Tzav
Parshat Tzav: Only Demagogues Teach People to Hate the ‘Other’
This week's sedra, speaking about sacrifices, prohibits the eating of blood: Wherever you live, you must not eat the blood of any bird or animal. If...
Seder Night — You Are What You Do
We live in an age where all of life’s challenges are handled by either psychology or psychiatry. Or, to put it another way, if therapy won’t help,...
The Importance of Giving Thanks
The first words we are taught to say each morning, immediately upon waking, are Modeh/modah and -- “I give thanks.” Note that the normal word order is inverted: Modeh ani, not ani...
We Must Plan for the Future, or Watch Our World Collapse
In her recent book, The Watchman’s Rattle (subtitled "Thinking our way out of extinction"), Rebecca Costa delivers a fascinating account of how civilizations die. Their problems become...
Love and the Principle of Sacrifice
One of the most difficult elements of the Torah and the way of life it prescribes is the phenomenon of animal sacrifices -- for obvious...
Is the Human Propensity for Violence the Reason We Can Eat Meat?
Why sacrifices? To be sure, they have not been part of the life of Judaism since the destruction of the Second Temple, almost 2,000 years...
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...
