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While this Friday December 25th is known as Christmas, this year Christmas coincides with a Jewish day of Remembrance and a minor Jewish fast day. The tenth of Tevet is a minor fast day which commemorates when Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian King, began his siege of Jerusalem in 587 BCE. 18 months later on the 9th of Av, in 586 BCE, the First Temple in Jerusalem would be destroyed. This minor fast day that we observe this week on the 25th of...Read more...

The story of Hannukah has one of the great villains of ancient times: Antiochus Epiphanes.  Unlike Alexander the Great who came before him, Antiochus used Hellenism as an “agent of cultural totalitarianism[1]”.

Antiochus, as so many antagonists in stories do, wanted power.  Specifically, he wanted to conquer Egypt.  His strategy for conquering Egypt began at home by demanding complete subservience to him and Greek...Read more...

One of the questions the medieval commentator Rashi asks is why the Torah begins with creation.  He points out that the majority of the Torah is a law book, so should it not begin with the laws?  His answer to the question is that we start with creation to show that God created the whole world.  However, he also offers another explanation for beginning with the story of how people came to be:

Our Rabbis explained: God...Read more...

Judaism is anything but monolithic.  Our text, scripture, is hardly the final word in any conversation.  Rather it serves as a jumping off point.  The text merely gives us an outline and then asks us, the reader, to fill in the details.  This dynamic of reader and text working together to uncover truths is the cornerstone of textual study.

The Torah, Judaism, and the universe are all expansive in nature, not...Read more...

When I was a young boy I would go every Saturday with my parents and siblings to our local synagogue.  My friends and I would attend Junior Congregation while our parents were in the main sanctuary.  We would pile into the small library and sit in our chairs and open the prayer books made especially for us.  Every week the leader would ask us questions about the prayers.  It seemed to my young mind that the questions being...Read more...