2011

A Journey of Passion: Spirit and Horror during the Christian Holy Season

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We were gathered in front of our church for the Palm Sunday celebration, dressed in our best clothing, full of Sunday morning cheer, waiting for the priest to arrive and begin the service. It would begin outdoors, as it does at Roman Catholic churches, and many other Christian churches, around the world. I went to one of the tables where I could pick up a palm frond to wave aloft during the procession into the church. It was the beginning of the most sacred portion of the year, the climax of the Christian story.

2011

Circumcision: Identity, Gender, and Power

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Circumcision is seen as the central mitzvah (or commandment) of Judaism. Even for nonreligious Jews, circumcision continues to be perceived as the sine qua non of Jewish identity. And yet, unlike any other controversial topic that we Jews address, the subject of circumcision is not to be challenged. What I intend to do here is to show that cutting out a portion of a child’s genitalia is fundamentally about gender and power.

2011

Radical Poets Set Jewishness Adrift

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A review of Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture: Don’t let the title dissuade you from reading this provocative book. The poets and thinkers represented here, many of them groundbreakers in American literature and thought, don’t know what it means either. That’s the point — to define these terms so as to answer a question that has not yet been posed in American poetry: what is radical Jewish poetry and how is it related to secular Jewish culture?

Torah Commentary

Numbers : Perashat Shelach : The Gaze Upon the Land

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The Tiferet Shelomo of Radomsk presents a reading that also stands as a proper critique of ideologies that claim to know best what is good for the “people”. He argues, a la Rousseau, that the spies decided that they knew better what was for the good of the people than did the people themselves, or Gd for that matter.

Articles

The False Bride

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Outside of Simon’s office, the hum of angels’ wings moved the air like an evening breeze. The pair, one young and one old — ageless really — but one wise, one unknowing, innocent, rested on the air and waited.

Articles

Treasures from the Trash

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In Sacred Trash, husband-and-wife co-authors Peter Cole and Adina Hoffman, who met while working on the editorial staff at Tikkun in the late 1980s, have produced a fascinating hybrid — part historical adventure, part bibliographical paper trail and scholarly prospectus, and part poetic meditation.

Torah Commentary

Shavuot: Sweet Dreams

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The holiday of Shavuot is distinct among the major festivals of Jewish life in that it has no obvious distinctive ritual elements. Whereas Pesach has its seder and marror, and Sukkot has its, well, sukkot, Shavuot is not given any particular unique commandments, not in its Biblical textual source, nor in the halachic sources.

Torah Commentary

Perashat Naso: Situating The Sotah

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This perasha contains within it a series of commandments which have been largely unrelated to normative practice for the last few thousand years. At least regarding one of these episodes, this is probably a positive thing; I’m referring of course to the Sotah text, the depiction of the ritual trial of the woman accused by her jealous husband of adultery.

Torah Commentary

Perashat Bamidbar

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I. Come In Under the Shadow of This Red Rock (or, Shelter in the Wasteland)
Bamidbar 1:1- And Gd spoke to Moshe in the Sinai Desert within the Ohel Moed (the Appointed Tent) on the First of the Second Month in the Second year from the Exodus from Egypt saying… This week we begin the fourth of the books which comprise the Torah. This book, known most commonly as “Bamidbar”, “In the desert”, is also known as “Homesh Hapequdim” or as it is conveniently translated, as “Numbers”. In general, we have a return to the narrative of the wanderings in the desert of the Israelites, as well as some commandments, most of which, as pointed out by Ramban, are not of normative force today, though as usual we will attempt to derive emotive meaning from them as we encounter them.

Jewish Wisdom

Torah Commentary: Bamidbar (In the Desert)

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Ambiguity and Mystery vs. Clarity & Display – Bamidbar 2011  by Rabbi Zalman Kastel

We crave clarity in an ambiguous world. In the early 90’s I struggled to decide on a vocation. Did I want to

join the Chabad movement’s team of “Shluchim” agents of the Rebbe to

try to bring Jews back to observance or undertake some other path? As

I sat at a tribute dinner to my grandfather Rabbi Joshua T. Kastel in

Boston shortly after he passed away and heard how much he was loved

and how he contributed as dean of the Lubavitch school there, I

decided that I did not need to decide because the decision had already

been made for me.

Torah Commentary

Perashat Behukotai: Walk This Way

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Here we are, at the close of the book of Vayikra, the book of Holiness, concerned primarily with what was intended to be the highest service, in the Temple, the sacrifices, and the priesthood. However, as the Bet Yaakov points out, this perasha does not begin as do most of the others, with a speech act to Moshe, that is, with the usual “And Gd spoke to Moshe”. Here, the perasha begins with ” Im behulotai tailaichu”, “if only you would walk in my ways and keep my commandments and make them happen”. This “if only”, then, is taken by the Bet Yaakov as describing not a command, but a prayer on Gd’s part, so to speak. It is not a command that is needed after the presentation of so much holiness, for a command can not actualize holiness; what is needed to make holiness happen is a prayer.