Heaven Is Built Down Here
Day two: heaven was made from fire and water, left unfinished, and handed to the earth. Every person is cast as a messenger, and the righteous sailors are the crew.
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The Animals Within
The animals came from the ground before us and live in our bodies. The mirror reading says the soul has lived them too, a thousand doses toward the day the wolf lies down with the lamb inside us.
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Where Is the Soul of the Carob?
Oil is the soul of the tree. שֶׁמֶן, oil, sits inside נְשָׁמָה, soul, and the question that follows is where…
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Turtles All the Way Down, and the Verse That Cut the Stack
Chagigah 12b builds the world on pillars, water, mountains, wind and storm, each with its own verse, and then refuses to add a sixth layer. Iyov removes the floor altogether: He hangs the earth upon nothing.
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Is Zionism Religious? The Job Is Stranger Than That
Shabbat 119b calls a person who says one paragraph on Friday night a partner in the work of creation. Sanhedrin 65b has Rava build a man whose only failure was that he could not speak. We are running that test again this decade.
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Swords Into Plowshares: the Verse Before the Famous One
The verse on the wall across from the United Nations is Yeshayahu 2:4. The sentence above it says where the peace comes from: from Zion goes out Torah. The swords are not destroyed in that verse, they are given a new job.
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The Key Nobody Holds
Infinite universes, infinite locks. Why no soul ever holds the final key, why light is both particle and wave, and why the first key is sesame.
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Bereishit With Hashem
God built worlds before this one. The Gemara calls a person His partner in Creation. Kol Tehom reads where that partnership leads.
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Mashiach ben Yosef
The Gemara names four craftsmen in Zechariah’s vision: Mashiach ben David, Mashiach ben Yosef, Eliyahu and the righteous Kohen. Who ben Yosef is, why Zechariah mourns him, and why Yosef is the flame.
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Yosef, Master of Dreams
His brothers called him ba’al hachalomot, the owner of the dreams. A dream is one sixtieth of prophecy, an unread dream is an unopened letter, and the master of dreams became the mashbir who opened the storehouses to the world.
