Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of God, the divine being said to have created the universe.
Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of God, the divine being said to have created the universe.
Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of God, the divine being said to have created the universe.
Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of God, the divine being said to have created the universe.
Before Rosh Hashanah began, I did some interrogation of myself. Not the sort you’d expect; it wasn’t an intake of my spiritual behavior or of my wrong doings. It went something like this: Chanel 1: I do not want to go to shul this year. Do I have to? I cannot deal with the gendered…
A letter handwritten by physicist Albert Einstein a year before his death, expressing his views on religion, will be sold on eBay this month with an opening bid of $3 million, an auction agency said on Tuesday. Known as the “God Letter,” the correspondence offers insights into the private thoughts about religion, God and tribalism…
Romantic rehabilitations of Jewish history’s most notorious heretic, Baruch Spinoza, seem — like Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura (God or Nature) — to be without end. German romantics crowned this radical unbeliever a “God-intoxicated man.” Zionists claimed the excommunicant as an ideological ancestor of modern Jewish nationalism. The array of uses and misuses of Spinoza by…
Baruch Spinoza was born in Amsterdam in 1632, the son of Portuguese Marranos (or conversos, or crypto-Jews) who had fled the Inquisition. A prodigy at Amsterdam’s Etz Chaim Yeshiva, he was widely expected to become a rabbi. As rumors of his heretical ideas spread, he was denounced by his yeshiva teachers, and in 1656 he…
The Last Testament: A Memoir by God (with David Javerbaum) By David Javerbaum 381 pages, Simon and Schuster, $23.99 The Final Testament of the Holy Bible By James Frey 398 pages, Gagosian, $50 You can find divine justification for just about anything. One preacher declares that God wants us to be “loving and compassionate,” but…
Reader Peter Siegel is upset by my November 11 column, titled “From Bono to Yahweh.” (Online it was called “How Yahweh Got Its Verbal Vibe Back.”) He writes: Why in the world would your article and title include a spelling of the name of G-d that offends many, many Jews from Orthodox to Reform, who…
Dear Rabbi: Thanks for the double-bar-mitzvah Saturdays, the two-shift High Holy Day services, the grief counseling, Hebrew school teaching, Torah study leading, hospital visiting, song leading and sermon writing, but seriously now — do us both a favor: Take a vacation. An article in the New York Times reports that recent research has shown the…
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