Audio with brief annotations. Let your eyes rest as you learn by listening. Exercise, walk your dog, or just kick back in a comfy chair and listen.
In our parsha, Vayera, we read the story of Sodom and Amorah, the story of true sinners in the hands of an angry God. Only things are a bit different. In Torah we see Abram and how he graciously pleads for the evil people of Sodom, imploring God not to...
In Gen 1:14-19 the Torah says that Hashem has set the lights in the sky for several reasons. First - to separate the day from the night. Second - to serve as signs for the times, days, and years. In other words to display stable predictable patterns to help...
Was Jesus a Rabbi? Some people would say yes, some no and some would be unsure how to answer. There is a good reason why the answers are often different. This is not a straightforward question. The term rabbi appeared sometime just prior to the first century CE and its...
Was Jesus a Rabbi? Some people would say yes, some no and some would be unsure how to answer. There is a good reason why the answers are often different. This is not a straightforward question. The term rabbi appeared sometime just prior to the first century CE and its...
The Psalms of Solomon are a collection of eighteen Jewish poetic compositions from around the second or first century BCE. They were originally composed in Hebrew or possibly in Aramaic. But the oldest manuscripts that have survived to our times are the Greek and Syrian Aramaic translations of the original...
Uncle Ben said to Peter Parker (Spiderman), “with great power comes great responsibility”. This is not a new idea. Parashat Emor (Leviticus 25) lists many privileges and responsibilities the priests must follow. What can we learn from these instructions?...
Torah describes daily obligatory offerings that God commanded to be brought on his altar (Numbers 28). They are called korban Tamid. They are but a token of what we owe truly owe God. But on Shabbat, God expected another offering - Musaf....
This lesson on Hanukkah was recorded live with audience participation. Flavius Josephus describes the days before the Maccabean Revolt. His version is not that different from the book of First Maccabees, which paints those events as a story of heroic struggle for the survival of Jewish ways of life and...
his lesson on Hanukkah was recorded live with audience participation. A late first century CE Jewish writer, Josephus Flavius, describes the history of the days before the Maccabean Revolt. How and why did Antiochus IV get involved in Israel’s cultural landscape, and why did he decide to force Israelites...