Jewish ritual
The red heifer.
The rabbis saw no contradiction, only completion.
It sees rituals as more than symbolic.
Law and ritual must rein in passion.
It takes hard work to get to the divine.
“I put them on, even though I don’t fully understand why.”
Why should we confess, particularly on Yom Kippur? Why in public? And why so many times?
If the decline of non-Orthodox Judaism is to be reversed, knowledge, ritual, and observance must become as central as social justice to Conservative and Reform Jews.
Are the seven hoshanot—ritual circuits of the synagogue—practiced today, on Hoshana Rabbah, an echo of the biblical conquest of Jericho?
The discovery of a 19th-century mikveh (ritual bath) in rural Connecticut suggests that earlier generations of American Jews were much more religious than historians—or their. . .