Parashat Ki Teitzei contains some of the Torah’s most difficult and frequently misunderstood laws concerning marriage, sexuality, divorce, inheritance, family responsibility, and the consequences of human desire. These commandments come to us from a social world very different from our own, yet they cannot be dismissed as irrelevant remnants of…

This Shabbat—September 6, 2025 / 13 Elul 5785—we read Ki Teitzei (Deut. 21:10–25:19), a portion overflowing with ordinary, lived mitzvot. It is famously dense because Torah refuses to confine holiness to rare moments or sacred rooms; it insists that holiness belongs in fields and workshops, kitchens and marketplaces, marriage and…

Some of Torah’s most famous scenes are also its most unsettling. A God who tests a father with the command to sacrifice his son. A God who “hardens” a tyrant’s heart. A God who floods the world. A God whose plagues ravage a nation. Modern readers rightly ask what these…

Pikuach nefesh—the preservation of human life—is one of the most important principles of Jewish law. When a human life is genuinely endangered, nearly every commandment of the Torah may be set aside to protect that life. This is not a modern reinterpretation of Judaism, a rejection of halakhah, or an…

Parashat Shoftim opens with a command that plants justice at the very threshold of daily life: “Appoint judges and officers for yourself in all your gates” (Deut. 16:18). Not only must Israel have courts; every community, at every gate, must carry the burden of fair process, clean leadership, and public…

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…

Dvar Torah — Parashat Re’eh (Deut. 11:26–16:17) “See (Re’eh), I set before you today a blessing and a curse…” With one word the Torah shifts us from hearing to seeing. We’ve spent much of Devarim listening to Moshe’s voice; now we are asked to look—clearly, personally, and presently. The verb…