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Take mourning rituals, for example. The familiar seven-day period of intense mourning, the shivah. Where did that come from? Well, let's dive into Bereshit Rabbah, a classic collec...
It's easy to read the Torah as a collection of individual stories, but the rabbis of old saw something more: echoes, parallels, and meaningful connections woven throughout the gene...
The verse in question is Genesis 49:28: "This is what their father Jacob spoke to them." But the Rabbis in Bereshit Rabbah notice something subtle. It doesn't say, "This is what th...
The book of Devarim, Deuteronomy, opens with the simple phrase, "These are the words…" And immediately, the ancient interpreters of our tradition, the rabbis of the Midrash, latch ...
In Hebrew, it’s Eleh hadevarim – Eleh meaning "these," and devarim meaning "words." But as with so much in Jewish tradition, there's a whole universe of meaning packed into those f...
Maybe you'd messed up before, and the consequences stung. It's a very human feeling, that hesitation. And guess what? Even Moses, Moshe Rabbenu himself, felt it too. Our story come...
Jewish tradition has a lot to say on the subject, and some of the stories might surprise you. Our jumping-off point is the verse in Deuteronomy 2:3, "You have circled this mountain...
The story of Esau and Jacob is a classic example, and the Rabbis in Devarim Rabbah, a collection of homiletic interpretations on the Book of Deuteronomy, unpack it with incredible ...
to a fascinating passage from Devarim Rabbah, a collection of rabbinic interpretations on the Book of Deuteronomy, that touches on this very dilemma and much more. The verse that k...
