Humash

This week's Parashah introduces us to the city of Shechem. Tamar Weissman examines the various appearances of this city throughout Tanakh, explaining that while it is a city of rupture, it is also one of covenant and fraternity.

Sarah Rindner asks what the Book of Leviticus, Leonard Cohen and the Liberty Bell all have in common.

Malka Simkovich hunts for Jewish texts in some unlikely places.

Yosef Lindell explores the true nature of the Aseret ha-Dibrot.

Tammy Jacobowitz reviews David Forman's latest book, a companion to Sefer Bereishit, and finds engaging, instructive literary analysis that pulls new insights from familiar stories.

Mark Glass puts the Akeidah in conversation with the surrounding narratives of the book of Genesis.

In Part II of his series on trop, William Gewirtz explains the principle of recursion and how it helps us interpret texts.

We only rarely have the opportunity to compare and analyze instances where a rabbi or scholar changed his interpretation over time, yet R. Yom Tov Lipman Heller published his Mishnah commentary, Tosafot Yom Tov, twice in his lifetime. Yaakov Jaffe examines the evolution of R. Heller's interpretation of the term “the Mouth of the Earth” in Pirkei Avot.

Does the Torah support a universalist or ethnonationalist political orientation? In this timely essay, Ezra Zuckerman Sivan explores the meaning behind key stories in Genesis through the framework of the Aleinu prayer.

At the height of the cholera epidemic in 1831, Hatam Sofer delivered a timely sermon on a perplexing midrash to Parshat Ki Tavo. The take-home, suggests Elli Fischer, is all-too familiar in the COVID era.