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What Is Wrong with Laughter?

The episode of the Golden Calf is full of questions. The people make an idol, sacrifice to it, and feast in front of it – and then they rise to dance, or to laugh. Countless questions come out of this scene. I want to focus on just one word: the word usually translated as “to…

by iWe

Why Me? Inquiring Minds Want to Know

My mother taught me, from when I was young, that a good question matters more than a good answer – and is harder to come up with. Life has proven her right again and again. Very few people can come up with a question of their own. Almost anyone can write an essay answering someone…

by iWe

Esau’s Contribution to Jewish Law

Did you know that Esau’s behavior is connected to a specific mitzva? We know that Esau is a hunter. The Torah uses one word for it: צַיִד, tzayid. Hunting is definitional for Esau – it is not only how he feeds himself and others, it is his occupation and his very identity: When the boys…

by iWe

What We Can Learn From Mere Grammar

The Torah contains fractalized layers of depth, where there are multiple facets of meaning. One of these facets is in the words and letters of the text. For example, it seems pretty obvious that words that have a single mem added as a prefix are connected to the same words without the mem. In general,…

by iWe

We Don’t Have the Big Picture

And it came to pass after these things, that it was told Avraham, saying, Behold Milka, she also has born children to thy brother Naĥor; ῾Uż his firstborn, and Buz his brother, and Qemu᾽el the father of Aram, and Kesed, and Ḥazo, and Pildash, and Yidlaf, and Betu᾽el. And Betu᾽el begot Rivqa: these eight did…

by iWe

Meat, Milk – and Sodom?

Avraham’s act of serving a calf together with its mother’s milk (Genesis 18) appears to prefigure the prohibition against cooking a kid in its mother’s milk. Why this particular connection? The act takes something whose natural purpose is nurture and growth—the mother’s milk—and uses it in the preparation of her offspring’s death. It short-circuits the…

by iWe

Why Does G-d (Only) Intervene When He Does?

If you read only the last four books of the Torah, you find it full of instruction: commandments, blessings and curses, retribution, justice, and mercy. Almost nothing happens without critical observation from G-d, Moses, or the people. Genesis is strikingly different. G-d seems to refrain from judgement, as much as possible. There are course corrections—G-d…

by iWe

Avraham and Wealth: A Moving Target

A lot of painful things happen in the first book of the Torah. In Avram’s life alone we see successive hardships and strained relationships—with his wife, with Hagar and Ishmael, with Pharoah and Avimelech —culminating in the Binding of Isaac. Genesis can be read through many lenses: the growth of relationships between brothers, between men…

by iWe

The Creation of the Family

Noah and his family — along with the animals — enter the Ark “with all their households” (G. 7:1). When they leave more than a year later, the language shifts. “Every animal, every creeping thing, and every bird, everything that stirs on earth came out of the ark by families” (G. 8:19). This is the first…

by iWe

Curse Those Who Curse You

Three times the Torah tells us a variation of the words spoken by G-d to Avram: I will bless those who bless youAnd curse the one who curses you Blessings make a person bigger, greater in ways that matter. But curses do the opposite; they shrink a person. When we look at the growing wave…

by iWe

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Quick Index to all the commandments that come from Genesis