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It's easy to just gloss over those descriptions of the Garden of Eden, but the Rabbis of the Midrash, those ancient interpreters of the Torah, saw so much more. to just a tiny piec...
And one powerful image used to describe this cycle is the idea of a "cup of terror." The Midrash, specifically Bereshit Rabbah, a collection of rabbinic teachings on the Book of Ge...
We all know the story: paradise, temptation, the apple, the fall. But before all that went down, there's this single verse in Genesis 2:15: "The Lord God took the man and placed hi...
It seems simple enough on the surface: "From every tree of the garden you may eat." But, like with so much in Torah, the rabbis saw layers upon layers of meaning hidden beneath the...
Take, for example, the verse in Genesis 2:21, "He took one of his sides [mitzalotav]..." Now, mitzalotav can mean either "one of his ribs" or "one of his sides." So, which was it? ...
The Midrash, those collections of rabbinic commentaries and stories that expand on the Hebrew Bible, often offer surprising perspectives. Here, in Bereshit Rabbah, a midrash on the...
We get a glimpse into that, and a whole lot more about marriage, divorce, and forbidden relationships in this fascinating passage from Bereshit Rabbah 18. It all starts with the fa...
The Torah, in the book of Genesis (Bereshit), gives us a glimpse of just how fleeting paradise can be. The verse says, "They were both naked, the man and his wife, and they were no...
We all know the story of their shame and banishment, but the Rabbis of the Midrash saw something even deeper happening at that moment. Something that changed the very fabric of rea...
