Things Have Changed
The Bible has profound things to tell us, things we clearly ought to know. We now have students in class, even those who have gone to church or synagogue all their lives, who have not…
Category: Jewish Tradition
The Bliss with Books
Back and forth from my desk to my shelves, ten, twenty, thirty times a day. The sources swirl around me. I am drugged by books. The sweet savor rises from the pages. A delirium of…
Today’s One-Liner (#295)
Studying Torah day and night means positioning oneself at every moment to acquire Torah, which is itself a function of bearing the burden of another. –Ira F. Stone, A Responsible Life: The Spiritual Path of…
The Jewish Inheritance
Leon Wieseltier also took pleasure in studying with Wiesel. The two would spend time on the phone analyzing, say, a poem by Hayim Nachman Bialik, or a rabbinical text or midrash. Wieseltier prized the “depth…
Today’s One-Liner (#280)
After [Elie Wiesel’s] death on July 2, 2016, the Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum praised him as an “heir of Jeremiah with his message of rebuke but also of Isaiah with his words of consolation.” –Joseph…
Today’s One-Liner (#264)
We need to be vigilantly alert for any signs of being more focused on the ground we have covered than the path ahead and must regularly renew our fervor for the learning and growth that…
Selective Appreciation
We usually like prophets when they say what we want to hear. They are especially welcome if they heap indictments on our enemies. When they get close to home, it is a different matter. –John…
Today’s One-Liner (#253)
While he was eating in restaurants and walking freely through the streets of New York, and while his estranged son was growing up in the relative safety of Palestine, Bashevis’s fellow Polish Jews were facing…
To Learn by Heart
In a more general vein: that which we know by heart will ripen and deploy within us. The memorized text interacts with our temporal existence, modifying our experiences, being dialectically modified by them. The stronger…
Ecclesiastes
Compared with the neat little nostrums of comfort-mongering minds who cross our t’s and dot our i’s, Ecclesiastes is as great, as deep, and as terrifying as the ocean. If this philosopher were alive today…