The attached paper was developed for use in a discussion on Yom Kippur 5784 at Temple Emanu El of Westfield, New Jersey.
04 Sep 2023
The Audience is the Issue
The portion of the Torah called Ki Tavo (Deuteronomy 26:1–29:8) is dominated by Moses’s restatement of the blessings and curses found in a different form in Leviticus 26. There, God described the blessings that would accrue to those whose behavior met the required standards and the curses, or rebukes, that would result from a failure to meet those standards. Th...
26 Apr 2023
This week in our regular cycle of Torah study we reach the part of the book of Leviticus known as the Holiness Code. In Lev 19:1-2 God tells Moses to say to the Israelite people, “You shall be holy for I, the Lord your God, am holy.” To the question, “How am I to be holy?” we are often pointed toward the meaning of the Hebrew root of the word that is translated as “holy,” that is, קדש, k...
09 Apr 2023
Having published the first major part of The Hidden Bones Apocalypse I am turning back for a while to my Golden Rule ethics project.
I reviewed Jeffrey Wattles' book on The Golden Rule, as a first step back into that subject, and I was drawn to the early Christian texts on the subject that he cites. Four major treatments of the Rule were written in 17th century England. I decided to l...
26 Mar 2023
https://doi.org/10.38159/erats.2023931
The first major part of the Hidden Bones Apocalypse was published on March 24, 2023 by Noyam Publishers as a monograph in its E-Journal of Religious and Theological Studies. The study can be accessed via the link above.
19 Mar 2023
My paper, "A Solution to the Duration Problem of Daniel 12:11-12," was posted on the Sage Advance Preprint server on March 1, 2023. This is a link to the paper on that server:
https://advance.sagepub.com/articles/preprint/A_Solution_to_the_Duration_Problem_of_Daniel_12_11-12/21788339...
06 Feb 2023
The Rabbinic Solution to Linking Shavuot and Sinai
Solving a Calendar Problem
Rabbinic Solution to Linking Shavuot and Sinai.02.06.23
Introduction:
The day on which the Israelites are commanded to observe the festival of Shavuot is one of only ten days marked in the Hebrew text of the bible with the unusual phrase בעצם היום הזה, b’etsem ha’yom ha’zeh. That phrase and the ten days t...
24 Jan 2023
Parashat Va’era 2023: The Names of God
The Hebrew name of the book of Exodus, Sefer Shemot, or the book of Names, gets its title from the names of the sons of Jacob who came to Egypt at the invitation of Joseph. But another issue of names comes up in the first part of Exodus that seems more important. We have already been introduced to Jacob’s family and reciting their names a...
07 Oct 2022
I have not posted new "Ethics Project" material on this site for quite a while. I did return to the subject for a teaching prepared for Yom Kippur, which synthesizes the several approaches to a universal ethic. This is the one-page synthesis.
Toward An Ethic of Respect
And God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. (Gen 1:27)
Y...
04 Oct 2022
This piece was written for an annual series of earth-related teachings published during the Hebrew month of Elul.
Included in “Earth Etudes for Elul” 5782
“And the giants began to kill men and to devour them. And they began to sin against the birds and the beasts and creeping things and the fish, and to devour one another’s flesh. And they drank the blood. Then the earth brought ac...