My beautiful boy, I received your note today about our upcoming visit this weekend with surprise, and with sadness. Of course I have known for a long time that you do not observe the religious aspects of Judaism, so it was not a surprise that you said you’d be leaving our house to return home…
In what may be one of Jake Tapper’s Jewiest tweets ever, CNN host Jake Tapper and former Mets and Phillies player Lenny Dykstra got into a discussion of the weekly Torah portion on the social media network. Just the common occurrence of a former star member of the @Phillies telling me that this week’s parsha…
I constantly stress to my students in Hillel that the dominant Western or Christian-centric exegesis of biblical stories is often very much the opposite of Jewish interpretation. This is true with the creation story and the subsequent eating from the tree, which Jewish thinkers read as a story of human empowerment as we gained the…
Storefront windows are being boarded up. The New York Times election needle of doom is back. On Election Day in 2020, the country is a ball of anxiety. Jews know a thing or two about political anxiety. This year, to counter it, some are turning to Torah study and spirituality to give themselves something to…
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…
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