Torah Commentary

Torah Commentary

Jacob's Ladder

As a kid, I loved to play "cat's cradle," the game with a piece of string with the ends tied together. You start with the string around your hands and then interlace it between your fingers to make different patterns with names describing what they look like.

Of Rolling Stones and Rising Monuments

If one were to search for a subtle underlying theme in Parashat Vayeitzei and its interpretive trajectory, it might be found in the way that Jacob takes the ordinary stones he finds around him during his travels, and uses them to create lasting meaning.

Not by Might, Not by Power

The widely-heralded book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, by Paul Kennedy, (New York, Random House, Inc.) was published in 1987. Kennedy's thesis is that a superpower emerges, grows, plateaus, and eventually declines, replaced by a new nation.