Religion & Holidays
He is still full of hope, and so—in replying to those who would misunderstand me and my method of reading the Bible—am I.
It’s not that they were exceptionally sophisticated or tolerant, as one popular recent article would have it—it’s that they lived surrounded by people who raised pigs.
The conventional assignment of the family birthright to the firstborn comes under criticism in all of the family stories in Genesis; in Exodus, the issue becomes even more complicated.
Ultra-Orthodox Jews have been one of the hardest-hit groups in Israel and elsewhere. Why?
It’s hard to extract universal philosophical or political lessons from a set of books that is so resolutely particular.
Read to its tragic depths, the Bible suggests that the last, cruelest laugh is always on God.
There’s a great deal more at stake in Exodus than getting the slaves out of Egypt. What might it be?
And future generations might shake their heads in disbelief at our own flagrant and heedless indulgence in real, literal idol worship.
A passage in the Talmud’s first tractate shows why it’s such a uniquely influential work, and so unlike anything in the history of Western literature, theology, or legal scholarship.
Some Jews who swear by yoga refer to it as akin to Kabbalah in its more mystical teachings and hence in some sense already “Jewish.” Others, not.
It’s at once the most famous affirmation of Jewish belief—no other sentence in Judaism is more powerful—and the most misunderstood.
Why the felt need to excise profanity from the Bible is fundamentally inane.
Moses inaugurated Jewish national independence. The prophet Jeremiah comes to oversee its collapse.
Bruriah is the only female cited repeatedly as a religious authority, and rarely shown in the roles the Talmud generally associates with women. Who was she?
