The Torah inherited a Mesopotamian cultural consensus that a Great Deluge had wiped out almost all of humanity. In the Gilgamesh epic, the gods (Anu and Enlil) inflict this catastrophe arbitrarily in a display of their power, but later defend their actions both as deserved punishment and designed to curb population growth. According to the…
At the end of the summer, synagogue pews tend to thin out. Congregants (and rabbis) are often on vacation, taking a break before the High Holidays. Some of us secular-cultural Jews who don’t attend synagogue in the first place also tend to detach from our engagement with organized Jewish life. This summer proves even more…
I didn’t talk to my roommate for an entire year. I was in 11th grade, at a Yeshiva where the students lived in dormitories on campus. Early in the school year, Sruli and I got into a fight. We were taking turns on a handheld electronic football game we had borrowed from a friend and,…
Amos dedicated the bulk of his prophecy to railing against the well-heeled, calling them “cows of Bashan”: “They drink [straight] from the wine bowls, And anoint themselves with the choicest oils— But they are not concerned about the food/ruin (shever) of Joseph” (Amos 6:6). And yet, in Amos’s climactic prophecy, he shifts his focus to…
Firefighters saved a 100-year-old Torah from a house fire on Arcadia Court in Boca Raton, Fla. on Tuesday. The firefighters extinguished the blaze and went back into the home to get the Torah at the owners’ request. In a video posted by the local CBS News affiliate, a woman, presumably a resident of the home,…
Updated 3:30 p.m. Images of Torah scrolls yanked open, ripped apart, and strewn across the sanctuary at Nessah Synagogue in Beverly Hills last Shabbat has left a knot in the collective gut of the Los Angeles Jewish community and American Jewry more broadly, which is still reeling from a murderous attack at a Jersey City…
Torah scrolls damaged in a fire that destroyed a Minnesota synagogue were burned again when the garage in which they were being stored caught ablaze. The remnants of the Torahs, which were irreparably burned in September after the 120-year-old Adas Israel Congregation in Duluth caught fire, were being stored in a local garage before they…
The 1,000-year-old Hebrew Bible that went on public view for the first time last week would not exist at all, or have survived this long, without the obsessive efforts of two obscure Jewish groups: the Masoretes and the Karaites. The Masoretes were a mysterious group of scholar-scribes, who starting in the Sixth Century worked to…
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