Professors on the Parashah: Studies on the Weekly Torah Reading

Oversized hardcover, 359 pages, NOT ex-library. Gentle external handling wear. Contents are clean and bright throughout, with unmarked text, free of inscriptions and stamps, firmly bound. Untorn dust jacket; price concealed on the front flap (jacket is not clipped). -- A collection of essays on the weekly Torah reading by members of the faculty of Bar-Ilan University, representing a distinctive approach that brings academic expertise in the sciences and humanities into dialogue with traditional Jewish scholarship. The contributors - drawn from fields as varied as Talmud, law, ecology, history and literature - offer fresh readings of the parashah that synthesise the sacred with the secular and the spiritual with the scientific. Among the contributions are Moshe Kaveh on faith and science in the third millennium, David Henshke on the nature of blessings, Rachel Lifshitz on the priesthood as both privilege and obligation, Yosef Ofer on courtship in the biblical text, Hannah Kasher on the role of controversy, Itamar Wahrhaftig on the question of how many arks existed, and Yael Shemesh on ecology in the Torah. Over forty scholars contribute in total, including Daniel Sperber, Amos Frisch, Nathan Aviezer and Admiel Kosman, ensuring a genuine breadth of disciplinary perspective. The book grew out of the Bar-Ilan Parashat Ha-Shavua project, a programme that has distributed weekly parashah sheets to tens of thousands of readers, and the essays retain something of that project's commitment to combining rigour with accessibility. Edited by Leib Moscovitz, an associate professor of Talmud at Bar-Ilan and author of Talmudic Reasoning, the volume is a useful resource for laypeople, rabbis and scholars seeking intellectually serious yet tradition-rooted commentary on the Torah.…