As a young child attending day camp at the local JCC, I had a counsellor who used to spend hours entertaining us with her ability to catch grasshoppers mid-jump. She would scoop them up by two of their legs and hold them up, showing off their stomachs. Hands quick enough to catch the hoppers were certainly noteworthy, but what fascinated me even more was the long springboard-like bounce of the jumping grasshoppers whose ability to keep jumping would certainly have surpassed the commercial energizer bunny. Read more...

One of the canards leveled against Judaism is that it holds Jewish people to be superior to all others. From early antiquity, in the writings of Josephus, we read of Antisemites who accuse Judaism of cultivating a disdain for the rest of humanity. Because we claim that God has singled us out from among all the peoples of the earth by giving us the Torah, the charge goes, we also believe that we are better than the rest of humanity. Hence we try to keep separate from everybody else. Hence we only use other people for our own benefits and our own purposes. Read more...

The task seems explicit: Moses instructs a select group of the leaders of Israel’s tribes to conduct a scouting expedition into the Promised Land. There, they are to observe carefully and return with the factual data that will allow Israel to plan the best approach to entering the land. Twelve individuals are selected – the spies – in later nomenclature. And Moses enumerates the facts they need to amass: Read more...

It's a familiar story:  The Jews are wandering in the wilderness and Moses and the people decide to send spies into the Land of Israel to see what kind of a place it is they're heading toward.  Of the 12 spies to go on this mission, 10 return horrified.  The place is filled with giants!  We don't stand a chance against them!  The people, upon hearing this terrifying message, panic: "If only we had died in the land of Egypt!  Or if only we might die in this wilderness!  Why is the Lord taking us to that land to fall by the sword?  Our wives and childre Read more...

Parshat Shelach-Lecha contains a justly famous description of the Land of Israel as a "land flowing with milk and honey."  The riches of Eretz Yisrael have endowed our people with a sense of home and of promise from our earliest ages.  But why should a contemporary Jew, at home in America and comfortable with English, care about Israel?  What has Israel done for us lately?    Read more...