Selected Passages
Selected passages
#Malkhut #Leadership #Torah #Structure
The purpose of the Book of Ruth is to instruct us in how shof'tim developed into m'lakhim, to tell us the story of the roots of malkhut.
#Leadership #Integration #SystemsThinking
The king is a leader whose principal function is to create a mode of interrelationship between the diverse and myriad elements of the kingdom
#Leadership #Body #Metaphors
The Talmud refers to the head as the king not because it is the most powerful of the organs, but rather because it is the seat of the brain, the switchboard that unites the various parts of the body.
#Judgment #CulturalCritique #MoralClarity
The Talmud understands the strangely repetitive expression "the judges judged" to be a definition of the cultural context: a time of counterculture, when a generation "judged its judges." This is not a historical statement, but a psychological one. It is not meant to establish chronology but to establish an ambiance. The fact that a generation judged its judges suggests that it demanded moral clarity. It implies that our story occurred in times characterized by the fact that "Every man did as he saw fit (yashar)" (Judges 17:6, 21:25), that it was an era when people did not accept what they were told but rather challenged authority with competing visions of what was just and right. Yashar implies moral rectitude. This generation that judged its judges did not want to know how the law entitled them to act; rather, they wanted to know how they should act