Jewish Law and “The English Patient”
Jun 14, 1997 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Naso
As the Pentagon struggles with the issue of adultery in the military, Americans feast on the photography and melodrama of the film The English Patient. Never have our moral fault lines been so discomforting. Garlanded in Academy Awards, the the film is a straightforward story of adultery in the army, albeit the British in North Africa in World War Two. Ironically, it ends up making a case for the Pentagon’s view that adultery can endanger the security of the military (with Count Amalfi desperately bartering his maps of desert paths for a German place to rescue his injured lover Katherine Clifton), though only after a long, glossy tale of passionate romance.
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The Status of Women
Sep 17, 2005 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Ki Tetzei
At JTS’s opening barbecue for faculty and their families last week, my son and daughter-in-law told us sheepishly that their fourteenth wedding anniversary had caught them unawares.
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A Feminist Mandate
Apr 8, 1997 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Vayak-hel
The recent conference in New York City on “Feminism and Orthodoxy” heralds a major escalation in the confrontation between Jewishly well-educated Orthodox feminists and a bitterly defensive rabbinic establishment. The word on the street in the weeks before the conference was that it would be a brief one, implying that the two topics had nothing in common. But reality proved the cynics wrong. Nearly a thousand Orthodox women of all stripes convened for two days of study, prayer and protest to challenge the gender inequities that abound in contemporary Orthodoxy. The plight of women stranded without benefit of a Jewish divorce from their husbands evoked an added measure of outrage.
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The Women’s Section
Feb 16, 2002 By Lewis Warshauer | Commentary | Terumah
A woman of valor–who can find her? In ancient Israel, the place one could not find her was in the Temple, except in a section called the ezrat nashim — literally, women’s territory. Only men served in the Temple as priests and Levites. This was partly a consequence of monotheism. In other ancient religions, with goddesses as well as gods, women would often control thetemples to goddesses.
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Giving Women a Voice
Nov 7, 1997 By Anne Lapidus Lerner | Commentary | Vayera
I did not celebrate my bat mitzvah on parashat Vayera; in fact, I never celebrated it at all. My birthday on 19 Heshvan gives me, as a legitimate birthright, permission to indulge in constant grappling with this incredibly rich and complex text. Yet I have never voiced that connection with a proper celebration of my Jewish coming of age.
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Miriam’s Death
Jun 16, 1999 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Balak | Hukkat
Biblical narrative begs for reader participation. Time and again we come across a story short on context, background and human emotions, traces of an event barely recalled and crying out for elucidation. This week’s parasha contains a gem of an example.
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The Torah’s Slip of the Tongue
Nov 25, 2000 By Melissa Crespy | Commentary | Hayyei Sarah
There’s a certain delight in catching a person in a “slip of the tongue”, a so-called “Freudian slip”. Unintentionally, the person speaking has let us into his inner thoughts and revealed a concealed, sometimes profound, perception. In our Torah portion this week, we seem to be privy to just such a slip of the tongue – or slip of the text, in this instance – and it leads us to profound insights about the nature of human relationships.
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Heroic Women
Jan 20, 2001 By Joshua Heller | Commentary | Shemot
In first few chapters of Exodus, the Egyptian Pharaoh enacts harsh decrees to curtail the fertility and fecundity of the Jewish people (Exodus1:9), “pen yirbeh” – lest the Jews multiply. His increasingly genocidal decrees are thwarted by increasingly heroic women. Last, and perhaps most daring of all, is Pharaoh’s daughter, who adopts the young foundling Moses right under her father’s nose, even though she knows that all Egyptians have been commanded to kill any male Jewish baby.
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