Category: Jewish Tradition

A Yiddish Counterculture

If you read enough of Peretz and the countless Yiddish writers who followed, a deeper vision begins to emerge: of a Jewishness infinitely more interesting, more challenging, and more relevant, rooted in tradition, shaped by…

Effort

A professor had a wife who never had dinner ready on time and every day he had to sit around waiting.  Suddenly it occurred to him that he could utilize this time and he began…

Open a Book

There was nothing to do but wait it out.  My kind has to become accustomed to loneliness.  And when one is alone there is nothing to do but study.  –Isaac Bashevis Singer, In My Father’s…

The Greatest Message

When readers ask me about the message of my works, I tell them that the greatest message we’ve got is the Ten Commandments. They are short, precise, clear. We don’t need new messages, and they…

Today’s One-Liner (#163)

My approach to the Beshtian  movement is influenced by what I have taken from it, namely, the need and obligation to love the Jewish people, and, through it, all people who need compassion in a…

Start Right Now

A man must not delay his start in the right direction until the next day. Do not say: ‘To-morrow I will commence to serve the Lord properly; to-morrow I will begin to worship from the…

A Mission

After the Holocaust, no further doubt was possible. Isaac said so explicitly: the work he wanted to fashion would also be a surviving testimony to a murdered people, a vanished culture, and a dying language. …

Today’s One-Liner (#137)

If we search for God and we are good to human beings, we are doing more or less our job. –Isaac Bashevis Singer, Conversations, edited by Grace Farrell

Getting Free

Olga Katunal [was]  a political activist who eventually left the Communist party and returned to Judaism via German philosophy. …[She] made more radical choices when she abandoned Trotsky for Moses in the interwar years. –Judith…