Height and Judaism generally don't go hand in hand. While our chain of mesorah and tradition are based on giants of Torah learning who were the leading authorities of their their respective eras, actual giants are not so... Jewish. Goliath yes, David, not so much.
I still remember my first high school basketball team when I was in Jewish Day School. In eighth grade, our starting center could not have been more than 5'6", and a starting guard was like Mini-Me with a kippa (with velcro straps - remember that invention?). As a tribe, we just were not very tall in those days. Nowadays, it's a different story - whatever steroids they're putting into milk these days is working its way up the food chain; kids are huge!
I was reminded about all of this from a recent brilliant blog post by Rav Natan Slifkin of Rationalist Judaism; he writes about the Rabbinic debate over Moshe Rabbeinu's height - is his being "ten cubits high" literal or allegorical? While I don't pretend to be a talmid chacham in the slightest, reading his article jogged my memory of a hysterical YouTube clip I came across years ago on precisely this subject:
I still remember my first high school basketball team when I was in Jewish Day School. In eighth grade, our starting center could not have been more than 5'6", and a starting guard was like Mini-Me with a kippa (with velcro straps - remember that invention?). As a tribe, we just were not very tall in those days. Nowadays, it's a different story - whatever steroids they're putting into milk these days is working its way up the food chain; kids are huge!
I was reminded about all of this from a recent brilliant blog post by Rav Natan Slifkin of Rationalist Judaism; he writes about the Rabbinic debate over Moshe Rabbeinu's height - is his being "ten cubits high" literal or allegorical? While I don't pretend to be a talmid chacham in the slightest, reading his article jogged my memory of a hysterical YouTube clip I came across years ago on precisely this subject: