Posts by Julia Blum

As we remember, Sukkot is “the season of our joy” – and the joy of Sukkot reaches its peak during its final day: Simchat Torah. Simchat Torah (lit. The Joy of Torah) is a holiday that marks the conclusion of the annual cycle of public Torah reading. We complete the cycle, and immediately begin the new cycle, […]

Ushpizin and Corona There are only two Biblical Feasts that have some intermediate days between the first and the last day of the holiday. In Leviticus 23, we read that on the first and on the seventh day of the Passover shall be “a holy convocation” and  Shabbat-rest with no work, and on the first and […]

Your Joy Will Be Complete  Almost immediately after the Days of Awe—the days of trembling and repentance —Sukkot begins. We finish the fast of Yom Kippur, we hear the last cry of shofar, and on the same night, we start building sukkot – tabernacles. Years ago, I lived in a house with a large common […]

The Wordless Cry   We just celebrated Rosh HaShanah – and it was indeed the most unusual Rosh Hashanah in Israel. Due to the coronavirus lockdown, we did not celebrate with relatives and friends; we couldn’t worship together; we couldn’t actually leave our homes! Almost everything about this year’s celebration was different – but amid […]

Shalom and Chag Sameach, dear friends! You probably know that here in Israel, we are entering a season called Chagim: Feasts, or Holidays. There are two Hebrew words that one commonly hears a during this season: Acherey Hachagim – “after the Holidays”. Everything is “frozen”, postponed, delayed for this time – but with a firm […]

We’ve been discussing the story of the Flood and touching different themes here. However, I think you all would agree that the Ark of Noah is at the very heart of this story. Therefore, it is the Ark that becomes God’s prophetic message to future humanity. In the old times, people would throw a bottle […]

A Preacher of Righteousness…. I would like to continue my train of thought from the previous post, where we noted that some Jewish sages compared Noah with Abraham, saying that, while Abraham interceded for the sinners of Sodom, Noah didn’t intercede for his generation. However, this is not what we find in the New Testament. […]

TL;DR: Noah was a man of grace in a corrupt world, and even his name—given by his father Lamech—carried a prophetic meaning of relief and comfort for humanity. As we  read  the beginning of Genesis 6, we were shocked by the description of the total evil and corruption of mankind. Then, in the midst of […]

The Watchers and the New Testament My dear readers, let me remind you why we discuss the New Testament on these pages if this whole series – BEGINNINGS – is supposed to be about the first chapters of the book of Genesis. When we entered Genesis 6 and I realized that most of my readers […]

My dear readers, since almost all the comments on my previous post declare that they don’t agree with me, I wanted to explain several things here. First of all, I am not trying to convince anyone of anything. Have you heard the expression: “Seventy faces of Torah”? It actually represents a Jewish view of Scripture: […]