Innovation in Jewish Tradition

Oct 3, 2009 By Marc Wolf | Commentary | Sukkot

I have yet to cave and get a Kindle, but I will be honest and say that it will probably be within a few weeks. From my years of schooling, I have gained an appreciation for, and on some level, a preference for the printed word—that is, a tangible, heavy, dusty, written word. I like holding a book, turning the pages, feeling the weight of the paper—and the Kindle just seems to fall flat. Nonetheless, the idea of browsing The New Republic and Commentary Magazine on one device seems almost a little bit too exciting to pass up.

Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 113a

Oct 2, 2009 By Marcus Mordecai Schwartz | Text Study

Some of our Sages felt that objects which could not be used on Shabbat in any permitted way should be utterly outlawed for the entire twenty-five-hour period of Shabbat. This prohibition, termed by the Talmud, Issur Tilltul (the prohibition on moving an object), eventually came to be known as muktzeh(things placed to the side). If an object has no use on Shabbat, it is in this category and, generally, may not be picked up and moved to another location on Shabbat.

Your Zeyde the Pilgrim

Sep 29, 2009 By Eliezer B. Diamond | Commentary | Ki Tavo

Try to imagine your zeyde, born and bred in Lithuania, dressed as a Pilgrim. I did. Like any other American schoolchild, I learned how the Pilgrims came to these shores on the Mayflower, how they celebrated their first harvest together with the Wampanoag Indians, and how this celebration became the basis for our holiday of Thanksgiving. For reasons that were not clear to me at the time, I tried to picture my Litvak grandfather as a Pilgrim, but the moment I did I started laughing.

Psychotherapy as a Lens for Conceptualizing <em>Teshuvah</em>

Psychotherapy as a Lens for Conceptualizing Teshuvah

Sep 26, 2009 By David Hoffman | Commentary | Shabbat Shuvah | Rosh Hashanah | Yom Kippur

I have always thought it interesting that Maimonides places so much emphasis on words in the process called teshuvah, even for transgressions not against other human beings. After quoting the verse from the Torah that speaks about the importance of confession (vidui) as part of the process for repairing a wrong enacted in the world (Num. 5:5–6), Maimonides emphasizes that this must be done with words. Teshuvah cannot be limited to an internal process of reflection. Maimonides stresses that any internal commitments must ultimately get expressed with words and counsels that the more one engages in verbal confession and elaborates on this subject, the more praiseworthy one is (Laws of Teshuvah 1:1).

Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 42a–b

Sep 23, 2009 By Marcus Mordecai Schwartz | Text Study

Cooking is forbidden on Shabbat. This is already clear in the Torah. In Exodus 16:23, Moses commands the Israelites to bake their manna before Shabbat begins. But what are the limits of cooking? Does adding spice to a completed dish constitute cooking? When is the cooking process considered to be complete?

The Psychology of Our Prayers

Sep 19, 2009 By Arnold M. Eisen | Commentary | Rosh Hashanah

Even when we are well-settled into friendships, marriages, or parenting, the quality of our connection with the people we care about most in the world has a lot to do with our happiness, our fulfillment in life, and our sense of belonging in the world.

Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 35b

Sep 18, 2009 By Marcus Mordecai Schwartz | Text Study

When does Shabbat begin? When does it end? What separates the mundane time of the week from the transcendent time of Shabbat? The simple answer is that Shabbat is the seventh day of the week. Since Genesis 1 places the night before the morning (“And there was evening, and there was morning . . . “), Shabbat begins at nightfall on Friday. But how do we define nightfall? When the sun sets? When it gets dark? When the stars come out?

The Distance to God

Sep 14, 2009 By Andrew Shugerman | Commentary | Text Study | Hayyei Sarah

Uncertainty presents one of the greatest psychological challenges we face in life. The ancient Rabbis addressed ambiguities in the Torah and in life by seeking wisdom from connections between those worlds. This midrash reveals how they understood prayer as a cathartic response to the travails that test our faith and how such an outpouring can transform our reality.

Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 34a

Aug 29, 2009 By Marcus Mordecai Schwartz | Text Study

Certain things must be done before Shabbat begins. Our mishnah gives a checklist of three things about which the head of a family must inquire as Shabbat begins. Have the necessary tithes been taken from the produce? Has the boundary delineating the extent of private space, the eruv, been properly established? Have the Shabbat lights been lit?

Standing at the Foot of God’s Mountain

Aug 29, 2009 By Abigail Treu | Commentary | Ki Tetzei

My beautiful daughter is no longer a newborn at fourteen weeks. Even more striking than the swift flow of time since her birth is the fleeting function of memory. I can no longer picture her in my mind as she looked in the first few weeks, just as I can no longer imagine my five-year-old son the way he looked when he was fourteen weeks old—or my little sister, now in her thirties, as she looked when we were kids. The images replace themselves, as a teacher of mine once put it.

Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 30a-b

Aug 22, 2009 By Marcus Mordecai Schwartz | Text Study

We are called upon to live a life of mitzvot, not die deaths in our attempt to fulfill God’s commandments. A dangerously sick person requires our care and we are commanded to desecrate Shabbat to fully see to his or her care. Our source puts forward a question about this with regard to a light that is preventing a sick person from sleeping. Are we allowed to desecrate Shabbat by extinguishing the flame and thereby help make rest and recovery possible?

Sanctifying Our Days

Aug 22, 2009 By Matthew Berkowitz | Commentary | Shofetim | Rosh Hashanah

What constitutes a life well-lived, a life of blessing, a life lived to its fullest? With this week marking Rosh Hodesh, the beginning of a new month, we pray for God to renew our lives in the coming month: “Grant us a long life, a peaceful life with goodness and blessing, sustenance and physical vitality, a life informed by purity and piety . . . a life of abundance and honor, a life embracing piety and love of Torah, a life in which our heart’s desires for goodness will be fulfilled” (Birkat HaHodesh). This Rosh Hodesh offers us a particularly auspicious moment to dwell upon this question of a life well-lived, for this week marks the beginning of Elul—a month in which we are encouraged to take a heshbon ha-nefesh, an accounting of our souls. At its essence, this idea demands that we look inward and become critical of ourselves and the year that has passed. This week’s parashah, Shof’tim, gives us one definition of a life of blessing that we can use in evaluating where we have come from and where we are going.

Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 12a

Aug 15, 2009 By Marcus Mordecai Schwartz | Text Study

We do not make personal petitions on Shabbat, leaving them for our weekday prayers. What then do we do when visiting the sick on Shabbat? During the week, prayer for healing is an element of our visit, but during Shabbat we should transcend our human needs so that we may gain a taste of the world to come. Nonetheless, we still remain in possession of our bodies on Shabbat and may still fall ill. Illness may sometimes inspire us to spiritual growth, but on the whole, most of us would say that we do not desire suffering or its rewards. So how do we approach the tension between the desire to overcome the physical on Shabbat and remain cognizant of the need for physical healing?

Repentance in the Heart of Summer

Aug 15, 2009 By Andrew Shugerman | Commentary | Re'eh

At the end of Friday-night services this past July fourth weekend, the rabbi of a major urban synagogue beseeched those gathered to celebrate the secular holiday by joining the congregation or renewing their memberships immediately. The rabbi explained that this year, due to the global economic crisis, congregational finances had become a vital concern. A budget shortfall had forced the clergy and lay leadership to cancel their policy of selling tickets for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services to nonmembers in order to “encourage” more people to pay some level of membership dues. More grievously, the rabbi noted that the congregation’s diminished financial position might require cuts in social action programs upon which the neighborhood’s less fortunate depend. An infusion of cash from membership dues, though, would limit the impact of these cuts.

The God of Israel

Aug 8, 2009 By Arnold M. Eisen | Commentary | Eikev

Again and again in this week’s portion the Torah commands us, reminds us, pleads with us, to hear the words that it comes to teach…”If/because [eikev] you hear and obey these rules and observe them faithfully,” Moses promises Israel in the very first verse of the parashah, God will favor you, bless you, multiply you (Deut. 7:12–13). If/because [eikev] you do not hear and obey the voice of the Lord your God, Moses warns the people at the close of the following chapter, “you shall certainly perish like the nations the Lord will cause to perish before you” (8:20).

Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 25b

Aug 8, 2009 By Marcus Mordecai Schwartz | Text Study

How do we transcend the physical on Shabbat? Our physical existence is temporary, and our bodies are eventually subject to the most horrendous filth, decrepitude, and rot. Shabbat promises a vision of the world to come, in which we imagine our physical decline halted and even reversed. We light Shabbat lamps to inaugurate this period, and light illumines our spirits as well as our homes. But what about our bodies? How do we prepare our all too imperfect flesh for the holy Sabbath?

Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 24a

Aug 1, 2009 By Marcus Mordecai Schwartz | Text Study

Our liturgy is a reflection of our values. On Shabbat, festivals, and Rosh Hodesh (the new moon), we read publicly from the Torah to connect our souls more deeply with God, divine wisdom, and the mitzvot. We also read from the Torah on Mondays and Thursdays so that we never go more than three days without Torah. However, on Shabbat and festivals we read a much larger passage than on Rosh Hodesh. Why?

Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 22a

Jul 25, 2009 By Marcus Mordecai Schwartz | Text Study

Abbaye (a mid-fourth-century Sage from Babylonia) reports that his teacher and adoptive father, Rabba bar Nachmani, usually followed the rulings of the early-third-century figure Rav. Here, Abbaye also provides us with three areas in which his master departed from Rav’s approach, favoring instead that of Rav’s contemporary, Shemuel. In all three cases, Rabba bar Nachmani, Abbaye reports, followed Shemuel’s more lenient approach. Let us focus on the last of these three, the case of dragging a bench over open ground on Shabbat.

The Book of Devarim and the Birth of Talmud Torah

Jul 25, 2009 By David Hoffman | Commentary | Devarim

Perhaps the greatest difference between the book of Devarim, which we begin this Shabbat, and the other four books of the Torah is the switch in modality. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers describe a story as it unfolds. The characters of these books experience these events as they occur in the moment. Not so the book of Devarim.

Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 20b

Jul 18, 2009 By Marcus Mordecai Schwartz | Text Study

Spoken words are central to Jewish thought, religion, and practice. Our Sages believed that the world was created with divine utterances and their Torah was transmitted from mouth to ear. The word mishnah probably means recited teaching. The Mishnah was almost certainly imported to Babylonia in an entirely oral form. But what would happen if the meaning of an obscure Hebrew word in the Mishnah was forgotten? This is exactly the situation that motivates Rabin and Abbaye’s Aramaic dialog in the above conversation.

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