Tashlich, Kate Chester

Repentance = Freedom?

 

In the thick of the month of Ellul, nearing Rosh Hashanah, penitence is or should be in the air. Also recently marked was the 75th yahrzeit of the great mystic, jurist, and theologian Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935).  As it turns out, Kook's  teachings on the meaning of repentance are among his most striking, stamped with his distinctive mix of piety and audacity. In his eyes, teshuvah, generally translated as "repentance" but literally and more powerfully "return," signifies not only a deepened and renewed commitment to religion and commandments but, paradoxically, nothing less than a new birth of freedom.

A Healthy Soul in a Healthy Body  Abraham Isaac Kook,  Emet.  Two passages from Orot Hateshuvah, translated by Alter Metzger, clarify the physical—and the paradoxical—nature of repentance.  SAVE

Rav Kook, in His Time and Ours  Torah MiTzion.  A series of lectures by rabbis and teachers on the 75th anniversary of Kook's death. (Video.)  SAVE

When the Rav Met the Rav  Jeffrey Saks,  Tradition.  In 1935, two philosophers of repentance, the young Soloveitchik and the elderly and ailing Kook, met in the land of Israel.

   SAVE

Rabbis Shapira and Elitzur.

A Grim Teaching

 

Every first-year law student knows that hard cases make bad law. In Israel, a particularly hard case lies in the ongoing controversy around an inflammatory Hebrew-language volume of Jewish religious law (halakhah) that offers justifications for violent treatment of non-Jews in general and of Israel's foes in particular. The debate has highlighted longstanding divisions within Israeli society; now that the courts and the police have gotten into the act, it has also highlighted the difficulties of drawing meaningful lines between free speech and incitement.

Rabbinic Text or Call to Terror?  Daniel Estrin,  Forward.  Although not the first fringe enterprise of its kind, Torat Hamelekh has been more widely disseminated and has caused a greater sensation.  SAVE

Support the Thinkers, Hate the Thought  Maayana Miskin,  Israel National News.  A sympathetic account of a rabbinic rally to protest police detention of rabbis endorsomgTorat Hamelekh.  SAVE

In War and Peace  Michael J. Broyde,  JLaw.  Talmudic law is not pacifist, but does its best to acknowledge and respond to the moral complexities of violent conflict.  SAVE

Kobi Oz

Psalms for the Perplexed

 

Some mainstream Israeli musicians have recently been turning for material to religious texts; others have become immersed in the musical traditions of Sephardi Jewry. The two trends have come together in a new album, Mizmorei Nevukhim ("Psalms for the Perplexed"), by Kobi Oz.

Psalms for the Perplexed  Makom.  Kobi Oz's new album: all songs are in Hebrew with English translation and an interview in English. (Audio and video.)  SAVE

My God  Kobi Oz,  YouTube.  Oz sings a "duet" with his late grandfather. (Video, Hebrew.)  SAVE

With All My Heart  Etti Ankri,  YouTube.  A devotional poem by Yehuda Halevi (ca. 1075-1141) set to music and sung. (Audio, Hebrew.)  SAVE

Lowly Spirit  Barry Sacharoff,  YouTube.  A musical interpretation of a poem by Shlomo ibn Gabirol (ca. 1021-ca.1058). (Audio, Hebrew.)  SAVE

My Father, Jacqueline Kahanoff, and the Levantine Dilemma  Ronit Matalon,  BGU Review.  On the struggles of two "Oriental" Jewish writers who arrived in Israel in the 1950's and never found their place.  SAVE

The Soul and the Machine

 

The astounding growth of the Internet, computer technology, and artificial intelligence is a commonplace of our time; so is the challenge each poses to familiar ways of commerce and culture, and even to our basic understandings of humanity. Some of the farthest reaches of these developments are expressed in the "singularity" envisioned by the futurologist Raymond Kurzweil: a dazzling world in which, by the end of this century, humans will have so thoroughly merged with fog-like nano-computers that our bodies will no longer have a fixed form and we will, at long last, wield total control over—or be wholly at the mercy of?—an utterly computerized universe.

The Internet Will Change Everything  Max Fisher,  Atlantic.  From college to cloud-computing, the Internet is transforming our world in ways we've only begun to recognize.  SAVE

How Can We Know the Thinker from the Thought?  David Gelernter,  Edge.  Hallucinatory and hypnagogic modes of thought suggest that human consciousness cannot be artificially replicated.  SAVE

The Extinctionists  Charles T. Rubin,  New Atlantis.  Our world is still recognizably human, but theorists of technological redemption are hoping to replace us with intelligent machines.  SAVE

Majesty and Humility  Joseph B. Soloveitchik,  Tradition.  The human drive for mastery is not to be condemned, but rather brought into balance with human finitude. (PDF)  SAVE

Insight & Analysis

Does Halakhah Change?  Francis Nataf.  Jewish Book Review.  Innovation in Jewish religious law is natural; but, as a new book suggests, everything depends on the context and the circumstances.  SAVE

Was Rebbe Nahman of Bratzlav the Messiah?  Justin Jaron Lewis.  H-Judaic.  Some of his followers may have thought so, but a newly translated "secret" scroll fails to cast much light on the issue.  SAVE

Post-Zionist Correctness  Joel Golovensky.  Haaretz.  Anti-Zionist bias is rife among Israel's academic elites, but the fact somehow seems to have escaped the notice of the editors of Haaretz.  SAVE

Against Dwelling Apart  Steven Bayme.  Jewish Week.  According to British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, contemporary Jews have internalized a mindset of victimhood that falsifies their strengths and endangers their future.  SAVE

A Statement of Principles  Nathaniel Helfgott, et al.  A consensus document by rabbis and educators on the place of homosexuals in the modern-Orthodox community.  SAVE

Of Rabbis and Robots  David Gelernter.  Biq Questions Online.  One of these years, there will be true, human-like robots; will we then be faced with a "machine rights" movement—and how then should we respond?.  SAVE

Judaism, Da  eJewishPhilanthropy.  Some two decades after the last big wave of Soviet immigration, young Russian-speaking Israelis have gathered in Jerusalem for an intensive three-day program of Jewish study.  SAVE

Voices & Arguments

Vital Signs: Uniting the Jewish People

 

Jack WertheimerWertheimer (thumbnail)

Fifth in a series on people and places fostering commitment to Judaism and the Jewish people.

"I've heard the term ‘Jewish peoplehood' very often but never understood what it meant," says Zhanna Beyl, an immigrant from Moscow now living in New York, where she works with Jewish teens from the former Soviet Union. "But I got a feeling for it when a small group of us from Latin America, Poland, India, and the States spontaneously sang the same Jewish musical tunes and talked." The setting of their encounter was the Nahum Goldmann Fellowship program, a unique experiment in global Jewish conversation.

Continue Reading "Uniting the Jewish People"  Jack Wertheimer,  Jewish Ideas Daily.  SAVE

SAVE "Vital Signs: Uniting the Jewish People"

Jerusalem Letter

The Sephardi Turn

 

Aryeh Tepper

The stagnation of Jewish tradition is hardly a new story. In a sense, it's a modern Jewish trope. In the 19th century, both the Reform and Conservative movements emerged as responses to this perceived atrophy. Leading Orthodox rabbis, some of whom agreed with the reformers' critique, devised their own attempts to revive the tradition—if, naturally, along more traditionalist lines. Unfortunately, none succeeded in arresting the decline.

Continue Reading "The Sephardi Turn"  Aryeh Tepper,  Jewish Ideas Daily.  SAVE

SAVE "The Sephardi Turn"

Voices & Arguments

Vital Signs: Torah and Service

 

Jack Wertheimer

As if from a fantastical time machine, some 300 youngsters disembark in the woods of western Pennsylvania to find themselves at the building site of King Solomon's temple in Jerusalem. In a quick briefing they are introduced to the biblical passages describing the construction project, invited to imagine the challenges confronting the ancient builders—how to move and hoist heavy loads of quarried stone, how to shape metal into giant candelabra—and then immediately drafted into the mammoth task. Only when their labors are complete, two and a half hours later, do they begin the mundane assignment of meeting their counselors and locating their bunks.

Continue Reading "Vital Signs: Torah and Service"  Jack Wertheimer,  Jewish Ideas Daily.  SAVE

SAVE "Vital Signs: Torah and Service"

Voices & Arguments

Vital Signs: Torah and Service

 

Jack Wertheimer

As if from a fantastical time machine, some 300 youngsters disembark in the woods of western Pennsylvania to find themselves at the building site of King Solomon's temple in Jerusalem. In a quick briefing they are introduced to the biblical passages describing the construction project, invited to imagine the challenges confronting the ancient builders—how to move and hoist heavy loads of quarried stone, how to shape metal into giant candelabra—and then immediately drafted into the mammoth task. Only when their labors are complete, two and a half hours later, do they begin the mundane assignment of meeting their counselors and locating their bunks.

Continue Reading "Vital Signs: Torah and Service"  Jack Wertheimer,  Jewish Ideas Daily.  SAVE

SAVE "Vital Signs: Torah and Service"

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