The German Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, viewed the Jewish nation as a nation without a seat, a nation without a physical space to dwell in. In fact, he viewed the Jewish people as a people who exist outside of history, who cannot be viewed in terms of time and space.

For me, it is unclear if the materialist understanding of the success and failure of Judaism expressed in The Chosen Few is actually helpful to us in our current moment.The actual values of Judaism go well beyond the simple fact that we prioritize educating our Youth.

If we are experiencing the flailing death of an empire that is bent on war and destruction as it peters out, Roth and Prine can teach us we’re not the first to know the feeling.

It appears that Jewish tradition made a clear choice to focus on personal and collective responsibility in this world, to atone, repent and correct as much as we can while we are alive, and not to delegate this responsibility to some force of evil which is beyond our control.

All people can truly deserve to be judged favorably, to become a true equal and friend, to become a teacher and master, if only we begin from a point of humility. This is the method of community organizing and learning I have come to embrace.

The idea of “hashgacha” is complicated. It is very hard for us to grapple with the thought that there is supervision at all, witnessing the horrors and the suffering that continuously occur in our world. At the same time, many people of faith do believe that even these horrors and all the suffering is a part of a divine plan.

Because of the long history of Jew Hatred and the modern incarnation of it, Anti-Semitism, I am loath to talk about the Jewish relationship towards money, and all the more so the relationship between Jewish beliefs and money.

The blue-pink cradle of day / Rocks itself in the fog of angst / And on the country roads / Where the first threads of sun light up / Shadows spread out with girdled axes / The trees become scared of death / Without final confession

The sandbox shimmers in seven colors, / and each thornbush burns like the burning bush, / a voice from heaven permits the sun to touch / and god himself says: see the form of my face.

This week we mourn the sudden passing of Sheyndl (Sheila) Lieberman-Reich, a long time Yiddish teacher and caring soul in the Los Angeles community. Our friend Shulem Londner wrote this eulogy in transliterated Yiddish and English.

One of the main claims made by Ilych is that studying is a lifelong endeavor that is done within the framework of community. It is something that never stops, something that you cannot measure and which encompasses all walks of life.

How did the requirement to begin educating one’s son at six or seven become a core value of Rabbinic Judaism and how did that determine the demographics of the adherents to Rabbinic Judaism? 

God’s apparent silence and inaction during the Holocaust drove many Jewish thinkers to explain the Holocaust theologically, particularly in the 1960s, when public discussion of the Holocaust became more of a norm.

After the experience of epochal violence, after life was destroyed for the Jews, there can no longer be that comparatively straightforward relationship between human beings, God, and language.

As Israel defeated three major armies in 1967, there was a sense that the Jews had overcome their weakness and could handle talking about the Holocaust.

Coral is alive, in the same way that trees and the forest live.

As a rabbi, I feel bound to accept certain traditional rabbinic roles. One of those is the explanation of the Halakhah related to Passover.

No matter how horrendous human beings are, they are still human, and so they deserve a second chance. This is why God extends yet another atonement to them.

It was this book that launched the Jewish Renewal movement and consolidated the Neo-Hasidic impulse.

“If there will be another Holocaust, it will be a Holocaust directed against all of humanity, maybe as punishment for the horrific crimes humanity has perpetrated against the Jewish people.”