As a rabbinical student, I learned that should anyone generate a novel understanding of the text (hiddush, in Hebrew), two questions need be asked: first, is this novel understanding of the text correct? and second, why has no one thought of this before? These two...
As any Bar Mitzvah boy will attest, the transition from minor to adult is manifested by the wearing of tallit and tefillin. (In the 1950’s and 1960’s many traditional synagogues organized Tallit and Tefillin Clubs as a way of keeping young Jewish teens engaged in...
Pharaoh remained unimpressed. Turning a staff into a snake was a feat easily repeated by Egyptian magicians (Exodus 7:11). And even after Moses’ snake swallowed up the magically crated ones, Pharaoh was unmoved. Turning water into blood fared no better. Pharaoh’s...
A most remarkable Jewish thinker of the twentieth century is Franz Rosenzweig. His biography is of special interest and requires more space and consideration than this short piece allows. But what if of signal importance is his organization of Judaism around three...
Rabbi Professor Moshe David (Umberto) Cassuto is counted among the great twentieth century Bible scholars. Born and trained in Italy, he escaped the Nazis in 1938 and emigrated to Israel where he taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for the last twelve years...
Moses calls together the entire Israelite nation and reports on the instructions he received from God regarding the construction of the Tabernacle (Exodus 35:2–19). Following the warning against engaging in any constructive work on Shabbat, Moses reminds the people...
When my children were young, they loved listening to me read to them. One of their favorite authors was Shel Silverstein and one of his books they loved most was called The Missing Piece. Briefly, the story is about a circle that is missing a sector. (For those who...
In the recent book The Grammar of God, author Aviyah Kushner demonstrates how the remarkable attentiveness the rabbis gave to the words of the text and their usage yielded nuggets of wisdom that untrained readers could never mine. While what follows does not appear in...
Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten introduced the word aesthetics into philosophical terminology in 1735 but in a way different from what is currently understood. Originally conceived, aesthetics was to fill in what Baumgarten believed were missing pieces in philosophy,...
American expert in constitutional law Albert B. Blaustein died in August 1994. While most people are not familiar with his work, his expertise made him invaluable in consulting on the drafting and implementation of the constitutions of Fiji, Liberia, Zimbabwe,...