JTS Torah Archive

Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals

Feb 2, 2018 By Marcus Mordecai Schwartz | Commentary

The most controversial tractate of the Talmud is undoubtedly Avodah Zarah, which discusses non-Jews and their religious practices. Most of the Talmudic passages in Justinas Bonaventura Pranaitis’s 1898 anti-Talmudic screed, Christianus in Talmud Iudaeorum (The Christian in the Talmud of the Jews) are drawn from this tractate. A surface reading of Avodah Zarah can be a demoralizing experience for modern Jews. Even though the Talmud is replete with more broadly humanistic statements, most of us would be scandalized by the provincial and xenophobic attitude toward non-Jews that one could take away from a rapid read through Avodah Zarah.

The Ruined House: A Novel

Jan 31, 2018 By Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary | Public Event audio

Ruby Namdar’s The Ruined House received the Sapir Prize, Israel’s most prestigious literary award. Now newly translated into English, Namdar’s tale of a man whose comfortable secular life begins to unravel in the face of haunting religious visions cuts to the core of contemporary Jewish-American identity.

Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz

Jan 29, 2018 By The Jewish Theological Seminary | Public Event video

Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews coexisted in Buczacz for 400 years. Then, during WWII, the town descended into intergroup violence and ethnic cleansing. Why? Anatomy of a Genocide profoundly changes our understanding of the social dynamics of mass killing and the nature of the Holocaust. It is also a warning of how it could happen again, in our own towns and cities—much more easily than we might think.

Finding the Golden Apple

Jan 26, 2018 By Tim Daniel Bernard | Commentary | Text Study

The Sage has said, “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in settings (maskiyyot) of silver” (Prov. 25:11). Hear now an elucidation of the thought that he has set forth. The term maskiyyot denotes filigree traceries . . .  When looked at from a distance or with imperfect attention, it is deemed to be an apple of silver; but when a keen-sighted observer looks at it with full attention, its interior becomes clear to him and he knows that it is of gold. The parables of the prophets, peace be on them, are similar.

—Moses Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed (trans. S. Pines) (11–12)

Israel: Between Tears and Songs

Jan 26, 2018 By Hillel Gruenberg | Commentary | Beshallah

Beshallah holds special importance for me and my family—it was the parashah of the week of my son Zeke’s bris three years ago, and that of the week of my wedding to Yael two years before that. Under the huppah, my rabbi (and brother-in-law) Aaron Brusso referenced the Zohar’s likening of the parting of the Red Sea to a wedding for having weeping on one side of the event and singing on the other (Zohar 2:170b).

Time to Mourn

Jan 19, 2018 By JTS Alumni | Commentary

By Rabbi Joseph Krakoff (RS ’98)

Death can make us uneasy. We don’t always know what to say to the bereaved. We may attempt to bring comfort by offering words that, though well-meaning, often fall flat—or worse. The truth, though, is that there are no magical, healing words that have the power to bring instant comfort. Our Jewish tradition brilliantly instructs us to extend sincere wishes of comfort and then remain silent, allowing the mourner to shape the conversation as they see fit. The reality is that our presence and our hugs speak louder and truer than any words we could utter.

Miracles of Biblical and Everyday Proportions

Jan 19, 2018 By Joel Alter | Commentary | Bo

Last week, God pummeled Egypt unprecedentedly with hail:

The LORD sent thunder and hail, and fire streamed down to the ground, as the LORD rained down hail upon the land of Egypt. The hail was very heavy—fire flashing in the midst of the hail—such as had not fallen on the land of Egypt since it had become a nation. (Exod. 9:23–24)

On the combination of fire and ice, Ibn Ezra comments that this was “a wonder within a wonder.” 

Forest Dark: A Novel

Jan 17, 2018 By Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary | Public Event video

A discussion with New York Times best-selling author Nicole Krauss on Forest Dark: A Novel.

A Jewish Response?

Jan 12, 2018 By Alisa Braun | Commentary

“And now in June 1943 something very strange is happening . . .”

Does Gertrude Stein belong on the “Jewish Bookshelf?” It probably depends on whom you ask. Alan Dershowitz accused Stein of being one of the collaborators who “made [the Holocaust] possible” since she had survived in France due in large part to a friendship with a Vichy government official. I’m guessing he would say “no.” 

Redeeming the Plagues

Jan 12, 2018 By Miriam Liebman | Commentary | Va'era | Pesah

Every year at the Passover seder, there is a brief pause in the chaos when everyone dips a finger in their cup of wine and spills a single drop for each of the ten plagues. We are spilling wine to remind ourselves that although the plagues served as miracles for us, those miracles came at the expense of others.

Reading Hosea Anew

Jan 5, 2018 By JTS Alumni | Commentary

By Dr. Mayer I. Gruber (RS ’70)

For 41 years, I taught and researched the biblical prophets, first at Spertus College of Judaica in Chicago and later at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva, Israel. I applied and developed the insights of my teachers at JTS—H. Louis Ginsberg, Robert Gordis, and Abraham Joshua Heschel, all of blessed memory, and, may he be distinguished for long life, Shalom M. Paul—into the intricacies of the biblical book of Hosea. The result is my new translation, introduction, and commentary.

Summoning a People

Jan 5, 2018 By Arnold M. Eisen | Commentary | Shemot

Two very different stories about who we are as Jews are forcefully presented in the opening chapters of the Book of Exodus. One of them—captured in the Hebrew title of the book, Shemot or “Names”—declares that we are the Children of Israel: a nation, a people, defined in the first instance and forever after by our ancestors and the paths they travelled. The other story teaches that we are disciples of Moses, the human protagonist of the book, and, like him, are servants of the God Who called to Moses out of the Burning Bush and bound us in covenant at Sinai.

Can We Grow?

Dec 29, 2017 By Deborah Miller | Commentary | Vayehi

Family relationships are often complicated, but the family of Jacob is a particularly jumbled mess. In this week’s parashah, the story has hints and echoes of a decades-long, tangled skein of family dynamics. We see these in two particularly problematic scenes in this parashah. Both scenes illustrate William Faulkner’s truism that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” And in this story, we see how the past leaks into the future.

The Life of a Hebrew Poet

Dec 29, 2017 By Matthew Berkowitz | Commentary

Born in 1873 in Zhitomir, Ukraine, Hayim Nahman Bialik went on to become the greatest Hebrew poet “since the time of Yehudah Halevi.” Holtzman identifies what made Bialik a national poet of the Jewish people: “a biography of epic, symbolic dimensions; a profound sense of involvement and identification with the national drama; and incontestable literary genius” (62). From humble beginnings in a family involved in the lumber trade, Bialik left at age 17 for the Volozhin yeshiva in Lithuania. There he immersed himself in yeshiva learning while simultaneously expanding his secular knowledge in preparation for academic studies in Berlin. 

Shylock and the Jews

Dec 22, 2017 By Edna Nahshon | Commentary

In 1960, a global wave of anti-Semitic incidents led Orson Welles, known for his daring Shakespeare productions, to cancel his plans to star in The Merchant of Venice even though playing Shylock had been his lifelong ambition. He had been thwarted twice, he said. First, “a man called Hitler made it impossible,” and now, again, he felt he needed to give up the project as “hate merchants started scribbling swastikas all over the place,” referring to the onslaught of synagogue desecrations that had begun on Christmas Day 1959 in Cologne, Germany.  

Hearing Our Own Stories

Dec 22, 2017 By Zohar Atkins | Commentary | Vayiggash

Although we know how it ends, this week’s Torah reading can be, by turns, anxiety-provoking, cathartic, and unsettling. We know a reconciliation between the brothers will take place, but we don’t fully understand how. We know a peace deal will be reached, but we suspect that, like all new agreements, its character will be tenuous, fragile, and ad hoc, its consensus constructed atop a minefield of lingering resentments and fundamentally conflicting narratives.

The Life of a Book

Dec 15, 2017 By Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary | Commentary

Every book has a life of its own, sometimes mundane and sometimes astonishing. The life of the book in which this page is found has been quite extraordinary. The book is a Hebrew Bible. It was born of fine parchment and ink, shaped by craftsmen and scribes who spared no effort to make it the best of its kind. It was written for a wealthy family in Toledo, Spain, in the 15th century, in order that they “and their children and their children’s children” might study it forever. Remarkably, it has survived to this day.

The Hanukkah Story I Need to Hear This Year

Dec 15, 2017 By David Hoffman | Commentary | Hanukkah

Stories have great power. We tell stories about ourselves and about our communities because they give our lives meaning, and they help us navigate between the past and the future. We use stories to help us make sense of the world and our place in it. Not far behind the seemingly innocent plots of many of the stories we tell about our community’s religious history lie profound cultural responses to our most pressing questions about what it means to be a human being and how to live life well.

Lighting Up the Dark Days

Dec 11, 2017 By Julia Andelman | Short Video | Hanukkah

Yosef: A Light in the Darkness

Dec 8, 2017 By Eitan Fishbane | Commentary | Vayeshev | Hanukkah

Parashat Vayeshev takes us deep into the pain and alienation of being human, of yearning from a low place of darkness and suffering. And yet the narrative also conveys the power of hope—a longing for God and redemption, for spiritual and moral healing in our human relationships.