Chapter 1, verse 4: Draw me, we will run after thee: the king hath brought me into his chambers: we will be glad and rejoice in thee, we will remember thy love more than wine: the upright love thee. Now,…
Chapter 1, verse 1: The song of songs, which [is] Solomon’s. OK, let’s stop there. Is it Solomon’s? I mean, obviously not, speaking with an eye to history. There’s no reason whatsoever to attribute this to Solomon. First of all,…
OK, then. The Song of Songs. I’m having trouble organizing myself, here (not altogether surprising, you say?), so I think I’ll take a moment before we go through the text closely and talk about a couple of general issues. If…
So. One of the good things about Congregation Beth Bolshoy is that they are big enough to have a variety of meetings and sessions of various kinds on various topics any day of the week. Something for everybody. Well, not…
Today’s Torah discussion was … wide-ranging. Not terribly deep, but we covered a lot of ground, and there were a couple of very interesting bits. We worked from the Haftorah portion, from 1Kings 8; the actual reading starts at verse…
Well, and Your Humble Blogger has started going to Torah Study again. My new local shul is Reform, and evidently the practice at Reform shuls is to have Torah study before service on Saturday mornings, unlike the Reconstructionist practice of…
I always have trouble with Purim. With the holiday, I mean, not with the pur themselves. Speaking of which, is it unusual to have a plural noun as a holiday name? If I were speaking in Hebrew (which, thank the…
Arthur Hlavaty, who has an actual weblog, linked to The Gashlycrumb Torah, which is as funny as you might expect. However, the blog that contains it, Baraita, turns out to be astoundingly good when just writing, blog-like, about what the…
The haftorah for today (Parshah Re’eh) was Isaiah 54:11-17, 55: 1-5. O thou afflicted, tossed with tempest, [and] not comforted, behold, I will lay thy stones with fair colours, and lay thy foundations with sapphires. And I will make thy…
Your Humble Blogger is still leading parshah discussion, by the way, although little of it has found its way into this Tohu Bohu. Somehow, I find that parshah notes are difficult and time-consuming to type up, and so rather than…