Parashat Shoftim opens with a command that places justice at the entrance to Jewish communal life: “Judges and officers shall you appoint for yourself in all your gates” (Deuteronomy 16:18). The Torah does not present justice as an abstract ideal to be admired from a distance. Justice must be established…

Taking it in light of the commandments for peace, mercy, and justice Read straight through, the Torah seems to speak in two voices. On one page there are battle lines, bans, bloodguilt, and capital crimes; on the next there is a call to love the stranger, to leave the corners…

Sinat chinam (שנאת חינם)—often translated “baseless hatred” or “gratuitous hatred”—is one of Judaism’s starkest warning lights. The Talmud remembers it as the moral rot that helped bring down the Second Temple; our history remembers it as the crack through which entire communities can fall. For Jews who center Torah’s ethical…

Modern life places two goods in real tension. On one side stands the Torah’s unsparing ban on avodah zarah—idolatry—as it thunders from Sinai and echoes through Deuteronomy. “You shall have no other gods before Me,” says Exodus, and the prohibition is not merely about loyalty but also about form: no…

Modern readers of the Tanakh soon encounter questions about authorship, composition, transmission, and historical setting. Who wrote each book? Was it written by one person or compiled from earlier records? When did it reach its final form? What circumstances caused a prophet, historian, poet, or sage to speak as he…

Parashat Re’eh begins with one of the most direct and personal declarations in the Torah: “See, I set before you today a blessing and a curse” (Deuteronomy 11:26). Moshe has spent much of Devarim asking Israel to listen, remember, teach, and obey. Here, however, he asks us to see. The…

Abstract Genesis 2:24—“Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and cling to his wife, and they shall become one flesh”—is frequently cited as a proof-text for a monogamy-only ethic. A close reading of the Hebrew text, however, situated within the canonical context of Torah law and Hebrew…

Modern Western society commonly treats monogamy as the only legitimate form of marriage. This assumption has become so deeply embedded in both secular culture and much of contemporary Judaism that many people instinctively regard plural marriage as foreign, immoral, or contrary to Torah. Yet the written Torah never establishes monogamy…

As we begin Sefer Devarim, the fifth and final book of the Torah, we enter a different kind of sacred landscape. The wilderness journey is drawing to its close. The generation that left Egypt has largely passed away, a new generation stands ready to enter the Land of Israel, and…

“And HaShem saw that the wickedness of man was great upon the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And HaShem regretted that He had made man upon the earth, and He was grieved in His heart.”—Bereishit 6:5–6 These words are among…