10,602 related texts · Page 188 of 221
It’s astonishing how much profound symbolism is packed into each curve and stroke. The passage deals with different methods of execution, but it's not simply a gruesome description...
Specifically, Tikkun (spiritual repair)ei Zohar 121 calls out to the very foundations of our faith, the patriarchs themselves. "Rise O Patriarchs, Masters of the Covenant!" the tex...
We open our mouths, and thoughts – complex, nuanced, deeply personal thoughts – become audible, shared, tangible. It's kind of isn't it? The Tikkun (spiritual repair)ei Zohar, a ce...
The mystics understood that feeling deeply. They saw it as a reflection of something profound happening in the spiritual realms, a cosmic ebb and flow of souls and divine presence....
to a fascinating passage from the Tikkun (spiritual repair)ei Zohar, specifically Tikkun 289, where the human eye becomes a microcosm of the divine. The Tikkunei Zohar, a later exp...
The second chapter of the Tanya makes a claim so audacious it takes your breath away: the soul of every Jew is "truly a part of God above." Rabbi Schneur Zalman does not mean this ...
The soul has ten faculties, and they mirror the structure of God. Chapter three of the Tanya lays out the architecture. Every Jewish soul—whether at the level of nefesh (נפש), ruac...
The divine soul has ten holy faculties and three garments—thought, speech, and action—through which it connects to God via the 613 commandments. But there is another soul inside yo...
The Tanya's fifth chapter makes a claim about Torah study that is unlike anything else in Jewish literature. When you study a halacha (Jewish religious law)h—a legal ruling—your mi...
"God has made one thing opposite the other" (Ecclesiastes 7:14). The Tanya's sixth chapter maps the dark side of the soul's architecture. Just as the divine soul has ten holy sefir...
Can you sanctify a steak? The Tanya's seventh chapter says yes—but only under certain conditions. Rabbi Schneur Zalman distinguishes between things that can be elevated to holiness...
Why can't forbidden pleasures be elevated to holiness? The Tanya's eighth chapter confronts this question head-on. The answer lies in the three completely impure kelipot (קליפות)—t...
Sefer Raziel HaMalakh contains something truly unusual for a mystical text—an alternative alphabet. Several of them, in fact. These are not the standard 22 Hebrew letters but speci...
Jewish tradition has a powerful way of visualizing that feeling, especially when it comes to exile and redemption. It involves the Shekhinah (the Divine Presence). The Shekhinah (ש...
Before God chose the land of Israel as His special territory, every land on earth was equally suitable for divine speech. Prophecy could happen anywhere. But once Israel was chosen...
Before Aaron was chosen for the priesthood, every member of Israel was eligible to serve as a priest. The entire nation stood on equal footing when it came to approaching God throu...
"This month": Nissan. You say it is Nissan. But perhaps it was some other month of the year? It is written (Exodus 23:16) "And the festival of the ingathering (Succoth) at the end ...
R. Nathan and R. Tzaddok say: Also for house rentals (i.e., If one says: I am renting it to you for this year, the understanding is until the beginning of Nissan.) But this does no...
Rabbi Yitzchak raised a sharp astronomical objection to a proposed method of calculating the calendar. If you followed a certain interpretation, he argued, the moon would already b...
The Torah commands regarding the Passover lamb: "On the tenth day of this month, they shall take" (Exodus 12:3). The Mekhilta zeroes in on one seemingly minor word in this verse, t...
Rabbi Yossi Haglili employed one of the most powerful tools in rabbinic reasoning — the kal vachomer, the argument from lesser to greater — to settle a question about the Pesach (P...
Rabbi Eliezer Hakappar Berebbi posed a rhetorical question that reveals something extraordinary about the Israelites during their centuries of slavery in Egypt. Did Israel not poss...
Rabbi Nathan offered a striking interpretation of the erotic poetry of Song of Songs that transformed it into a lesson about the sanctity of marriage. When the verse says "a locked...
"And they shall place it on the two side posts and on the lintel": I might think that if he placed (the blood on) one before the other, he has not fulfilled his obligation. It is, ...
Rabbi Akiva, the towering sage who reshaped all of rabbinic Judaism, offers his own answer to the question of why the Torah only mentions water when prohibiting the cooking of the ...
Rabbi Yishmael cuts through the debate about burning Passover leftovers with a characteristically logical argument. The other sages needed the repeated phrase "until morning" to es...
The Mekhilta catches a redundancy in the Torah's Passover instructions that most readers would never notice — and from that redundancy, it extracts a legal ruling about where God's...
(Ibid. 15) "Only on the first day you shall eliminate leaven from your houses": before the eve of the festival. You say this, but perhaps (the meaning is) on the day of the festiva...
Rabbi Yehudah argues that the Torah's command to "eliminate leaven from your houses" means one specific thing: you must burn it. Not scatter it, not crumble it into the wind, not t...
The Torah warns that whoever eats chametz during Passover will have their soul "cut off from Israel." The punishment is kareth — spiritual excision from the community. But the Mekh...
The Torah states that "all labor shall not be done" on the festival days of Passover. The Mekhilta reads this straightforwardly — it tells us that labor is forbidden on the first a...
(Ibid. 19) "In your houses": What is the intent of this? I might take (13:7) "in all of your boundaries," literally (i.e., even if the chametz is not yours); it is, therefore, writ...
Rabbi Yossi raised a deceptively simple question about the Passover laws that reveals how carefully the rabbis read every word of the Torah. The commandment says, "Seven days shall...
The prophet Joel declared, "And all who call in the name of the Lord shall be saved" (Joel 3:5), a sweeping promise of deliverance for anyone who invokes God's name. But the Mekhil...
The Mekhilta, the tannaitic midrash on Exodus, pauses on a detail in the Exodus narrative that seems redundant: "And they asked of Egypt vessels of silver and vessels of gold and r...
The Mekhilta, the tannaitic midrash on Exodus, records Rabbi Nathan's interpretation of one of the most loaded words in the Exodus narrative. The Torah says the Egyptians "vayashil...
Rabbi Akiva ruled that a Jewish master may not keep uncircumcised male servants in his household. Circumcision — the sign of the covenant between God and Abraham — was required of ...
The Torah states "and you shall circumcise him; then he shall eat of it," establishing circumcision as a prerequisite for eating the Passover sacrifice. The Mekhilta uses this vers...
Having established that the Pesach (Passover) sacrifice could be eaten "in two places" by a single group, Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai was asked the obvious follow-up question: how exac...
Rabbi Nathan found a specific legal scenario embedded in the verse "let all of his males be circumcised." The phrase excludes a particular case from preventing a master's participa...
God spoke to Moses with a command that sounds absolute: "Sanctify unto Me every first-born" (Exodus 13:1-2). Every first-born — of humans, of animals, of everything that opens the ...
Variantly: The bechor of a man is likened to the bechor of a beast, and the bechor of a beast to the bechor of a man. Just as with a beast, a miscarriage (of the first pregnancy) e...
The Torah commands: "the one lamb shall you offer in the morning, and the other lamb shall you offer in the afternoon" (Numbers 28:4). This is the tamid, the daily perpetual offeri...
Rabbi Chiyya ben Nachmani delivered a teaching in the name of Rabbi Yishmael that cuts against every natural human instinct. The verse in (Deuteronomy 8:10) already commands, "You ...
The verse (Exodus 13:7) commands, "Matzoth shall be eaten the seven days, and chametz shall not be seen unto you." A straightforward reading suggests these two rules — eat matzah, ...
The Torah's prohibition against possessing chametz during Passover seems absolute. But the rabbis of the Mekhilta identified important exceptions based on two principles: domain an...
Rabbi Eliezer agreed that the tefillin (leather phylacteries worn during prayer) belong on the upper arm rather than the palm, but he arrived at the conclusion through entirely dif...
The Mekhilta DeRabbi Yishmael records a teaching by Rabbi Yitzchak about the precise placement of tefillin, the leather boxes containing Torah passages that Jewish men bind to thei...
