From New Year to Arbor Day

 

The holiday of Tu Bishvat ("the fifteenth of Shvat") falls this year on Wednesday, February 8. What are its origins, and when and why did it become incorporated into the calendar as the Jewish "Arbor Day"?

When Have "Most of the Rains Passed"?  Yair Goldreich,  Bar-Ilan University.  Analyzing the climatic factors that help determine the date of Tu Bishvat.  SAVE

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The Dangerous Mr. Nelson

 

Eric Nelson is a danger to academia. You would not think so from his background. He is the Frederick S. Danziger Associate Professor of Government at Harvard University. He has had a proper education, at Harvard and Trinity College, Cambridge.

Jerusalem and Athens  Leo Strauss,  Jewish Ideas Daily.  Strauss's seminal essay on the Greeks, the Hebrew Bible, and the profound differences between the two.  SAVE

Created Equal  Joshua Berman,  Oxford University Press.  While ancient Greece is often considered the cradle of political thought, "the patrimony of modern political thought rests no less squarely in the texts of the Bible."  SAVE

The Bible and the Good Life  Aryeh Tepper,  Jewish Ideas Daily.  Arguing with God is one thing. Where is the evidence that the Bible is a philosophical text?  SAVE

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Jerusalem's Ego and Id

 

Biography is not the same as history. Biography charts the outer and inner life of a person—character, spirit, morality, emotion, perhaps even soul. History, by contrast, incorporates different narratives and pieces of evidence, seeks out new data, then rises above all the fragments with a synthesis.

Montefiore on Montefiore  Todd Leopold,  CNN.  There have been many reactions to Jerusalem: the Biography. Here, the author responds to the challenge put to him and delivers his own verdict on the book.  SAVE

Melisende’s Psalter  British Library.  Like her ancient predecessor, King David, Queen Melisende commissioned artwork for the Book of Psalms. Now preserved at the British Library, it can be seen online.  SAVE

Lord Shaftesbury: God’s Reformer  Marena Fisher,  Yale Standard.  Lord Shaftesbury, the paradigmatic Victorian reformer, dedicated his life to improving the condition of the poor, rehabilitating felons—and restoring the Jews to their homeland.  SAVE

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America the Biblical

 

The Greeks did not invent equality. Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, and the gang famously believed that the rich are different from you and me—not merely because they are shaped by their privileges but because they are actually, literally made of superior stuff.

Origins of Democracy in Ancient Greece  Kurt A. Raaflaub, Josiah Ober, Robert W. Wallace,  University of California Press.  Athens may have recognized political equality among citizens, but not just anybody could be a citizen.  SAVE

Americanism: the Fourth Great Western Religion  David Gelernter,  Random House.  "America is no secular republic," Gelernter says; "it's a biblical republic."  SAVE

The Scepter Shall Not Depart from Judah  Alan L. Mittleman,  Lexington Books.  There is a "theological-political predicament" in modern Jews' spiritual dependence on their surrounding political systems.  SAVE

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Insight & Analysis

Mincing Words  Philologos.  Forward.  The Yiddish expression makhn ash un blote—"to make ashes and mud" or "to make mincemeat" of someone—exemplifies the influence of biblical idiom on Yiddish phraseology.  SAVE

Whitewashing Black-Jewish History  Sivan Zakai.  jweekly.  Both African-Americans and Jews journeyed from slavery to redemption, ultimately united as allies in the civil rights era. It makes for an appropriate and inspiring school lesson. But is it good history?.  SAVE

Vatican't  Giulio Meotti.  Ynet.  Israel's decision to cede some sovereignty over the "Hall of the Last Supper" to the Catholic Church will only embolden the Vatican's campaign to appropriate Jewish Jerusalem.  SAVE

The Original Kosher Jesus  Fred MacDowell.  On the Main Line.  150 years ago, Rabbi Elias Soloweyczk published commentaries on Matthew and Mark, aimed not at rejecting the Gospels but showing their concordance with the Talmud.  SAVE

Kosher Jesus  Gil Student.  Torah Musings.  Shmuley Boteach's strategy is a familiar one—reject the Gospels and strip Christianity of its beliefs. It is, in fact, an old form of polemic. (And Boteach's reaction to media coverage of his book is telling.).  SAVE

Analyzing Ashkelon  Sam Roberts.  New York Times.  Science is revolutionizing the study of ancient Ashkelon—revealing mysterious cylinders as parts of ancient looms, proving that what we thought were palaces may really have been stables.  SAVE

The Bad Samaritan  Amy-Jill Levine.  Biblical Archeology Society.  You can't understand the story of the Good Samaritan without knowing that a Samaritan was the last kind of person to whom a Jew would look for help.  SAVE

Q & A

But for the Grace of Babylon: A Conversation with Irving Finkel

 

On the way to work from his home in south London, Dr. Irving Finkel often finds himself sitting on a bus reading the Hebrew Bible while surrounded by black church ladies studying their Bibles. "If they only knew what I was thinking," he muses.

Unlike his fellow passengers, what the Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian Inscriptions at the British Museum is thinking is that the Bible is not the literal word of God, but that it was crystallized during the sixth-century B.C.E. Babylonian exile by a displaced people from Judea who had lost their country, whose deity was invisible, abstract, and unforgiving, and whose monotheism had gone wobbly. Their decision to create "scripture," something that had never before been attempted, saved the refugees' civilization and enshrined their religious identity. The result was Judaism.

Continue Reading "But for the Grace of Babylon"  Elliot Jager,  Jewish Ideas Daily.  A British Museum scholar offers a Darwinian explanation for Judaism's survival.  SAVE

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The Weekly Portion

Terumah

 

Exodus 25:1 – 27:19

The Sanctity of the Small  David Hazony,  Jewish Ideas Daily.  The problem with grandeur is that it contains a bit of a lie.  SAVE

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