Religion & Holidays
Awareness of tragedy and evil doesn’t necessarily engender vigor and resilience—it can just as plausibly nurture fatalism and a sense of helplessness.
North American synagogues experience these two purposes not as mutually reinforcing but as incongruous—which is why they’re in trouble.
On the overuse of ḥag same’aḥ and the redundancy of gut yuntif.
In Israel and in traditional communities, life and liturgy don’t run away from hardship. Most American Jews prefer to think on the brighter side, but that comes at a high cost.
This week, we dig through the archives to bring you excerpts from our best conversations on faith, mortality, tradition, obligation, and sin.
When news of the Jewish justice’s death spread last week, so did a lot of weird claims about how Jews should mourn and what they believe. It’s time to clear things up.
The liturgy of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is full of liturgical poems that stretch the bounds of the Hebrew language and the patience of worshipers.
Whether it’s Judeo-Arabic, or Judeo-Italian, or Judeo-Spanish, or the Judeo-German better known as Yiddish, they all mix in varying amounts of Hebrew.
The Israeli intellectual joins us to talk about the ideas in his best-selling book on the revolutionary political teachings in Moses’s last speech.
That’s the contention of a new book by a major historian of ancient Judaism. It deserves serious attention, but it also overstates its case.
An ancient rabbinic dispute pitted eminent scholars against one another. The Taḥanun prayer is rooted in that story of public shame and private distress.
Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Aharon Lichtenstein, and what Maimonides missed.
A look at the legacy of the man who revitalized Modern Orthodoxy and who was perhaps “the greatest composer of sermons in the English-speaking rabbinic world.”
To where and what language does the great Jewish philosopher and his name belong?
