Latest Essays

A Post-Destruction model of Jewish Identity: Reading and studying Torah as if our life depended on it.

The Rabbis describe how the ritual of ניסוך המים (water libation), which they believed was to have occurred every Sukkot in the Temple, was a point of contention between the Pharisees and the Sadducees, but why was it so contentious and what was at stake in its performance?

Despite its pious content, especially when seen against Kohelet, the book of Ben Sira (Ecclesiasticus) was not canonized and today has been marginalized. This was not always the case. Ben Sira held a prominent place in earlier Jewish, and even rabbinic, communities.

The scribes who wrote the addendum to the laws of Sukkot (Leviticus 23:42-43) used inner-biblical exegesis to explain the requirement to dwell in booths as a commemoration for the miraculous booths (not clouds) that God created for the Israelites at their first stop on the way to freedom.

After being swallowed by a fish, Jonah prays to God in its belly. Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer reads this prayer midrashically, as a description of an alternative mission for Jonah in the underworld, in which he saves the fish from the Leviathan and promises to bring it (the Leviathan) as a sacrifice for the righteous in the end of days.

Fasting in contemporary Judaism is tied to specific days in the calendar. In the Bible and Second Temple texts, however, fasting—communal and individual—was primarily a response to current events.

Praying for God’s shekhinah, Divine presence, in heaven to radiate on earth.

The nature of prophecy is perhaps one of the most overlooked questions, but it was critically important to the medieval Jewish philosophers Sa’adia Gaon, Judah Halevi, Ibn Ezra, and Maimonides.

Channah and Elkanah’s yearly feast resembles a Mesopotamian fertility ritual; when year after year God doesn’t respond, Channah turns to God directly and enters the Tabernacle.

The inscrutable story of the Akedah, can be better understood in light of its subversive sequel, the equally morally complex book of Job.