Author Archives: Rabbi Louis Jacobs

Rabbi Louis Jacobs

About Rabbi Louis Jacobs


Hermeneutics (Drash)


One way of absorbing knowledge:
straight to the head.




Hunting in Judaism




Landau points out that the Talmudic discussion on the duty to kill wild animals even on the Sabbath (Shabbat 121b) only applies to wild animals that come among men and endanger human life and not to pursuing the animals in their own haunts. Walter Rathenau’s remark has often been quoted in this connection: “When a Jew says he’s going hunting to amuse himself, he lies.’


Ordination (Semihah)

Ordination is the appointment of a disciple as a rabbi, or teacher of the Torah. The Hebrew term, semikhah, is based on the verse: "And he laid his hands (va-yismokh) upon him, and gave him a charge, as the Lord spoke by the hand of Moses" (Numbers 27: 23).

In the verse, Moses, at the command of God, lays his hands on his disciple Joshua so that the latter can function in Moses’ stead as the spiritual leader . In the early Rabbinic period, only scholars who had received ordination, in the chain reaching back to Joshua, could act as judges and this was reserved for scholars in the land of Israel, the Babylonian scholars being given a minor form of authority as agents of the Palestinian scholars.

After the close of the Talmud, full ordination came to an end . Although the term semikhah is still used for the ordination of rabbis, this is not the full ordination but is only convention by which a scholar does not render decisions in Jewish law unless he has been authorized so to do by a competent Halakhic authority who has himself been ordained. There is no special ceremony for this type of Rabbinic ordination. The usual practice in Orthodox Judaism is for a student, after having mastered the texts, to present himself to a rabbi for examination. If the rabbi believes that the student is competent he gives him a document stating that he is qualified to render decisions and that he is now given permission so to duo Nowadays, even among many of the Orthodox, ordination takes place after a course of Rabbinic studies in a seminary and the certificate of ordination is given by the principal and other teachers of the seminary.

This Rabbinic diploma is the usual form of ordination in Reform and Conservative seminaries. The major technical difference between the older semikhah and the later, simple ordination is that in the latter the ordinand cannot become a member of a court to inflict capital and corporal punishments.

Since these were abolished, in any event, in early Rabbinic times, the distinction, nowadays, has no significance. Modern seminaries train their students in many disciplines other than that of pure Jewish law, so that ordination in these seminaries is a mailer of attesting to the proficiency of the graduates to carry out all the other functions of a modern rabbi such as preaching, counselling, and pastoral work, and there is often a service of ordination and a celebration with pomp and ceremony, rather like a university graduation ceremony, from which, in fact, it seems to have been copied.

Compassion & Tzedakah




Electricity on Shabbat

The Hebrew word hashmal, used in Ezekiel‘s vision of the Chariot (Ezekiel 1:4, 27), is usually translated as ‘amber’ or ‘electrum’ and may be based on the recognition by the ancients that rubbing amber produces sparks.

This word is, in fact, used for ‘electricity’ in modern Hebrew. Israeli children are astonished to find, as they think, that the prophet knew of electricity! Once this mysterious power was discovered and harnessed to cater to human needs, a host of problems became acute in connection with Jewish religious law. With regard to the Sabbath, for instance, on which the law forbids kindling fire (Exodus 35: 3), the question arose of whether this meant that it was wrong to switch on an electric light on the Sabbath.electricity on Shabbat

In the early days, some Rabbis tried to argue that electric lights may be switched on on the Sabbath, since there is no combustion in the filament and, in any event, the electric power is already present, the switching-on of the light being only an indirect cause. Conservative Jews accept this argument and permit the swittching-on of electric lights but do not allow cooking by electricity on the Sabbath, since to cook food is a separate prohibition. In the Reform system there is generally a relaxation of the strict Sabbath laws. Orthodox Judaism today does not permit any use of electricity on the Sabbath. Orthodoxy sees it as wrong not only to switch on electric lights but even to open the door of a refrigerator so that the light will come on.

Most Orthodox authorities today also ban the use of a microphone or a telephone on the Sabbath on the grounds that sparks are produced and that the flow of the current is chanced through the speaking voice.

The Great Assembly (Anshe Kenesset)

The body of sages said to have flourished during the early days of the Second Temple. The Men of the Great Synagogue or Great Assembly are mentioned as belonging to the chain of tradition at the beginning of Ethics of the Fathers: “Moses received the Torah from Sinai and delivered it to Joshua, and Joshua to the Elders, and the Elders to the Prophets, and the Prophets delivered it to the Men of the Great Synagogue.

anshe kenessetThey said three things: Be deliberate in judgment, and raise many disciples, and make a fence for the Torah.’ This sets the date of the institution in the time of Ezra and, indeed, in some Rabbinic sources, Ezra is said to have been a member of the body. But in the following section of Ethics of the Fathers it says that Simeon the Just was one of the survivors (or remnants) of the Men of the Great Synagogue. Now Ezra’s date is around the year 444 B.C.E., while Simeon the Just died around the year 270 B.C.E. How, then, could Simeon have been a survivor of the Men of the Great Synagogue?

As a result of this kind of chronological problem and the evident legendary elements in many Rabbinic accounts of the Men of the Great Synagogue, some Christian scholars used to assert that the whole institution is fictitious, an idealized source for later Rabbinic Judaism. Many modern scholars, however, Jewish and non-Jewish, tend to see the references to the Men of the Great Synagogue as allusions not to a body that existed only at a particular time but to an ongoing activity extending over the first two centuries of the Second Temple. On this view, that they ‘said’ three things has to be understood as meaning that their activity can be summed up as establishing a successful administration of justice, teaching the Torah to as many students as possible, and protecting the laws of the Torah by building a fence around them, that is, by introducing safeguards against encroachment on the forbidden realm; they forbade, for instance, the handling of an axe on the Sabbath lest it be used to chop wood.

In any event, references in the Rabbinic literature to the Men of the Great Synagogue can be taken to mean that ideas, rules, and prayers, seen to be pre-Rabbinic but postbiblical, were often fathered on them.

Mixed Dancing in Judaism

Mixed dancing was severely frowned upon by the Talmudic rabbis. The Rabbinic interpretation of the verse: “Hand to hand shall not go unpunished” (Psalms 11: 21) was to prohibit a man and woman not married to one another to hug or kiss, and ‘hugging’ was held to apply to any touching of hands or other parts of the body; this was quite apart from the conviction that mixed dancing leads inevitably to lewd conduct.

At weddings the men danced while the women looked on. The sole exception was the practice of some tzaddikim, or saintly men, (following the Talmudic precedent) to dance with the bride mixed dancingbut, even here, there was no actual touching. The bride would hold a handkerchief at one end while the man held the other end without ever actually touching the bride herself.

In many communities, especially among the Hasidim, this practice continues to the present day. In the Kabbalistic teaching, to dance with the bride was to dance with the Shekhinah, of whom the bride is the representative on earth.

Many medieval Jewish communities had a specialized dancing-house (Tanzltaus), chiefly for use when marriages were celebrated, but voices were sometimes raised against the dancing-house because of the mixed dancing which often took place there. Rabbi Jonathan Eybeschirz writes that he was once asked by a bishop of the Church why Jews object to mixed dancing, since the verse says: “Then shall the virgin rejoice in the dance, and the young men and the old together” (Jeremiah 31: 13). The rabbi replied that, on the contrary, the verse implies that there will no mixed dancing, since the virgin is said to dance apart from the youth and old men who dance together.

The prohibition of mixed dancing is still applied rigorously by most Orthodox Jews, although a few see no harm in the practice nowadays, evidently because such a widely accepted form of social behavior in the West hardly involves the kind of embrace forbidden because it is the prelude to sexual intercourse.

Satan, the Adversary





Chutzpah is arrogance, impudence; a Talmudic word that made its way into Yiddish from which it was adopted into American slang and has now entered the English language and is recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary as an English word. It comes from a root meaning ‘to peel’ and hence ‘to be bare’; chutzpah means barefacedness, sheer cheek. The classical definition of chutzpah is given in the story of the boy who killed his parents and then threw himself on the mercy of the court on the grounds that he was an orphan.

chutzpahChutzpah is seen on the whole as as undesirable trait. The Talmud, interpreting events in its own day in Messianic terms, observes that just before the advent of the Messiah chutzpah will be found in abundance–the young will show no respect to the old. In a later Talmudic source, when a boy was exceedingly disrespectful to venerable rabbis, the rabbis concluded that since he had so much chutzpah it was obvious that he was a bastard. In another Talmudic passage chutzpah is said to be royalty without a crown; it possesses regal power even though it has no regal backing and can prevail even against kings.

Yet, as in other cultures, there is often a grudging admiration for chutzpah in the Jewish tradition. The rabbis ironically remark that chutzpah seems to be effective even when directed against God Himself in the case of Balaam, who was at first told by God not to go on his mission to curse Israel, but when he persisted was told by God to carry on (Numbers 22: 12, 20). Chutzpah is particularly admired when it consists of standing up bravely against the powerful or when it is an expression of sheer determination to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds. The many tales of the saints arguing with God on behalf of their people, with their basis in the story of Abraham bargaining with God on behalf of the men of Sodom (Genesis 18:22-32), have been seen as a kind of holy chutzpah.

Reprinted from 
The Jewish Religion: A Companion
, published by Oxford University Press.

Bat Kol – A Divine Voice




Reprinted from 
The Jewish Religion: A Companion
, published by Oxford University Press.

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