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Posted in Culture, Beliefs, Texts on July 2nd, 2009 
2 Comments »
I’m a big proponent of making the Torah relevant for modern society and everyday life. Maybe it’s my whole Orthodox Jew trip of believing that Torah was given to us as a gift. Maybe it’s because I’m a writer, and I want to believe that the stories we tell have life beyond when we tell […]
Posted in History, Texts, Israel on June 30th, 2009 No Comments »
I’m not much of a museum person. It’s not that I’m uncultured (I mean, I am), but I may have had some bad experiences as a kid at museums. You see, my parents are museum lovers. So we went to a lot when I was young. But let me tell you something people. Being seven […]
Posted in Texts on June 29th, 2009 No Comments »
Most of my favorite Talmud stories center around Yalta. She’s a Talmud-era commentator who’s sometimes thought to be Rav Nachman’s wife (the Talmudic sage, not the Hasidic rebbe) and is also sometimes thought to be the daughter of the Rosh Galuta, the head of the world Jewish community at the time. And she was an […]
Posted in Life, Texts on June 26th, 2009 No Comments »
Rava said to Rav Papa and to Rav Huna b. Rav Yehoshua: If a written ruling of mine comes to your attention and you see some flaw in my logic…. if I am already dead then, do not tear it up but also do not follow my ruling. Do not tear it up, for if […]
Posted in Culture, Texts on June 19th, 2009 No Comments »
Ever since I discovered this great Talmud Comics site, I’ve been gnashing my teeth trying to decide how to portray it. Yonah Lavery constantly produces a great, sometimes clever, sometimes thoughtful and always outright stunning adaptation of the Talmud in the form of comics. It doesn’t get the whole scope and nuance of a Talmud […]
Posted in Texts on June 17th, 2009 3 Comments »
Or are you just excited to be in the land of Israel?
This week’s parashah is all about the spies that Moses sends into Israel to check out the land that the Israelites are supposed to conquer. There’s a similar spying theme in this week’s haftarah. And this week at MJL we featured an article about […]
Posted in Culture, Practices, History, Texts on June 15th, 2009 No Comments »
I don’t know why I thought that I.B. Singer died before the 20th century. Maybe I was mixing up the exotic, Eastern European ghetto, pre-indoor-bathroom locales of his stories with the land he actually lived in, the America to which he immigrated in the year (uh, quick…consult our I.B. Singer biography to pretend I know […]
Posted in Practices, Life, Texts on June 12th, 2009 No Comments »
I will never forget the first time I was able to daven after my daughter’s birth. When I was able to hold the siddur in my hands once again, on the second Shabbat of my daughter’s life, I found myself reaching out to a different God than ever before. I found myself talking not to […]
Posted in Culture, Texts on June 11th, 2009 No Comments »
Matt Bar sees dead people.
He doesn’t hold séances or visit graveyards — not literal graveyards, anyway. Instead, he takes revisits key moments in Jewish history from the Torah and Tanakh, and breathes new life into them. He does this mainly by becoming them. In “The Silence,” he is Isaac, bound up by his father, being […]
Posted in General, Texts, Israel on June 10th, 2009 No Comments »
A.B. Yehoshua asks why the label of a “Jewish state” so important, especially since “the combination ‘Jewish state’…sounds hostile and offensive to the non-Jewish citizens of the country.” What about just plain “Israel”? (Ha’aretz)
What exactly does the term “Jewish state” mean? Is there enough agreement on its meaning to make the term meaningful? (Forward)
The Bible […]
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