The GR”A explains the fundamental difference between Sefer Devarim and the rest of the Torah is the level of prophecy. He says that, for the first four books, God spoke directly through the throat of Moshe Rabbeinu in real time. Sefer Devarim was prophecy on the level of the other prophets who usually had their prophecies at night while sleeping and then told them over to the people the next day while awake.
ONE OF THE most divisive issues today in Israel politics is the drafting of yeshivah students into the Israeli army. It is not a new issue at all, being hotly debated for decades now. Those pushing for the draft have their reasons, and those against it have theirs, without any real common ground between them.
I must have been a teenager when I first saw the movie: 2001: A Space Odyssey. No, dinosaurs were already long gone, but it was decades ago. It was quite spectacular for its time, and its message was quite prescient, but there was also so much I just didn’t get.
THE CONCEPT OF blessing is known far and wide and for who knows how long now? In the Torah, it goes back to the first man, and even before. Both religious and secular people use the term, and both mean that the blessed is successful. It’s just that the religious person says that the source of the blessing is God, and the secular person just means that they have been lucky.
LAST WEEK I received a forwarded email that was titled, “Joseph Goebbels Could Have Written This in the 1930s.”
