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Virtual Talmud

Maimonides once explained that we can only know God by what God is not: God is not limited. God has no end and no beginning. God has no corporeal form and therefore no gender (which is why I use only gender-neutral language to refer to God). However, we also have certain positivist beliefs about God.…

There are few terms more fraught–and less clear–than “Zionism.” For some, it is the fulfillment of God’s ancient promise to Abraham to give the land of Canaan to his descendants. For some it is a movement of spiritual and cultural renewal, affirming the centrality of our historic homeland. For others it is a political movement…

When I heard about Israeli president Moshe Katzav deciding not to refer to Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the leader of the Reform movement, by the title “Rabbi,” I laughed it off. But the more I think about it, the more the “Leibowitz” in me starts to rise up. For those who don’t get the reference, Yeshayahu…

Zionism is as old as Judaism. It began when God first spoke to Abraham and told him to leave his homeland for a land that God would show him. That same land would be promised to his great grandchildren, the children of Jacob, renamed Israel, for having struggled with the Lord. Just as all Jews…

Former Prime Minister of Israel Golda Meir was once asked if she could ever forgive the Arabs for seeking Israel’s destruction. She replied by saying that she could forgive them for killing her sons, but she couldn’t forgive them for forcing her to kill their sons. I like this quote because it reflects the pain…

Israel’s response to the recent kidnapping of Cpl. Gilad Shalit by invading Gaza is nothing shocking or all that new. It is what is: the latest incarnation of the cycle of violence that continues to cripple the Middle East. Is Israel justified in taking such actions? Ultimately, justice in the context of Middle East politics…

The Hamas raid last week against an army post in Israel, with the murder of two soldiers, the wounding of a third, and the kidnapping of 19-year-old Gilad Shalit, is a classic example of the tactical jujitsu that terrorists have employed dating back to the FLN’s attacks on French troops in Algeria in the 1950’s.…

I took my seventh graders to the U.S. Holocaust Museum the other day. We stopped in front of the crematorium door as the students took in what it meant: that the Nazis burned the bodies of their mostly Jewish victims like we might burn garbage. Jewish mourning practices have always prohibited cremation. Jewish tradition believes…

Of all the issues I engage with my congregants around, I find shiva–Jewish mourning practices–to be among the strangest and most challenging. The vast majority of my congregants –like the overwhelming majority of Jews in this country today–don’t understand themselves as bound within a halachic (Jewish legal) framework that obligates them to act in particular…

One of the many rituals surrounding death in the Jewish tradition is the practice of going to a mourner’s house during a seven-day mourning period called “shiva.” The mourner sits on a low stool and he/she is comforted by friends, relatives, and loved ones. Not only, however, are there rules and rituals involving the mourner…
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