[This year— 5774 in the biblical reckoning of time, 2013 according to the Gregorian calendar — Israel’s ‘Festival of Lights’ or Hanukkah’s first of its 8-day celebration falls on USA’s Thanksgiving Day, Thursday. According to Rabbi Benjamin Blech of aish.com, to commemorate this unusual coincidence, a new descriptive word has been coined: “Thanksgivukkah.” He […]
Read more[It is not only fair but necessary to provide all the sources/resources cited in the Commentary that has been featured in the last three books of the Torah. For readers who have consistently followed chapter after chapter of Waiqrah, Bemidbar and Dabariym, you will have noticed names of Jewish sages, scholars and commentators, many Europeans […]
Read more[What does it matter where the ‘remains’ of the earthly part of man ultimately rests? Bereshiyth 3:19 says: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. Ecclesiastes 12:7: the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it. We tend to hang on to the material […]
Read more[And so the great prophet of Israel concludes his final discourse to 2nd generation Israel with blessings upon each of the 12 tribes descended from Jacob’s 12 sons. They have kept their tribal lines in tact for the four centuries of slavery in Egypt; each tribe is identifiable and recognizable through the census taken […]
Read more[Just as Miriam broke out in song during the exodus, here Moshe does the same. This song, says the commentator, is a ‘didactic ode’. Man oh man, what a cultured and educated leader was Moshe and why should he not be? After all he grew up in the Pharaoh’s palace, was a prince of […]
Read more[It is encouraging to hear these words: you are about to lie beside your fathers. The Hebrew Scriptures are not ‘other-life’-centered. The religion that sprung from it—Judaism—therefore focuses on what man can do in his lifetime, not to earn points for the next life or be assured of making it into ‘heaven’, but […]
Read more[Having come from Christian/Messianic ROOTS, it is difficult NOT to keep connecting what we have been taught by man-made religion, and what we have learned —not from ‘religion’ but from the Revelation given on Sinai, the Torah. Truly, how does one reconcile the declarations of YHWH in this chapter with the Christian teaching that —- […]
Read more[This chapter ends with one of the ‘OT’ verses we used to commit to memory as Christians/Messianics; we should continue to keep it in mind, now that we have seriously taken YHWH’s TORAH as the one and only ‘very words of God’. The Revelator on Sinai has given humankind only the instructions relevant […]
Read more[When the Catholic faithful hear the world ‘altar’, they tend to connect it with the structure at the front of their church where the priest conducts the ‘holy sacrifice of the mass’. Protestants have a similar area at the front of their church, although an ‘altar’ is not in place, usually a lectern or dais […]
Read more[First fruits: specifically, wheat, barley, vines, figs, pomegranates, olives, and date-honey” — who would have guessed that even the kind of fruit is regulated for offerings? Couldn’t you just bring apples and strawberries and mangoes? If you did not have the specific ‘fruits’ on the list but truly wanted to bring an offering, would God not […]
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