The Lonely Man of Faith By Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik Maggid Books and OU Press, 2012, 79 pages     Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903-1993) was a highly respected rabbi and teacher and the mentor of over 2,000 rabbis. He had a PhD from the University of Berlin, wrote his doctoral dissertation on the philosopher [...]

By Israel Drazin   Rabbis who offer legal decisions frequently say that customs that have been practiced for some time have the same power as laws, but actually some do and some don’t. Traditions are a twin sister to customs. Generally customs refer to behaviors and traditions to ideas, but people use the terms interchangeably. [...]

By Israel Drazin   A reader of this website sent me three questions. Here are the questions and my responses.   (1)   I note your pure blue eyes and wonder: how do some Jews have such?  Do these features prove that Jews were breeding with non- Jews way back in history?   I THINK THAT [...]

By Israel Drazin   Maimonides wrote his Mishneh Torah, his code of Jewish law. About a century after his death in 1204, Jacob ben Asher (1270–c. 1340) composed a code of Jewish law that he called the Tur. Roughly two centuries later, Joseph Karo (1488–1575), compiled his law books, which he named the Shulchan Arukh. More [...]

Kohelet A Modern Commentary on Ecclesiastes By Leonard S. Kravitz and Kerry M. Olitzky UAHC Press, 2003, 132 pages     Kohelet, its Hebrew name, Ecclesiastes in English, is one of the twenty-four books of the Hebrew Bible. Both names mean “assembly” or “assembler.” The book’s author states that he was the son of King [...]

By Israel Drazin   It is certainly true that most Jews today, including most rabbis, see a distinction between ritual and social laws. The first focuses on God and the second on people. In the Ten Commandments, for example, the laws forbidding idols and those requiring rest on the Sabbath are seen by most Jews [...]

By Israel Drazin   I think that the greatest difficulty that people have in understanding rabbinic literature is that it is hard for them to see what prompted the rabbi to say what he said. I’ll focus on one point.   Very soon after the Five Books of Moses was canonized, probably during the time [...]

By Israel Drazin   Why do people feel that they should listen to their clergy? There is nothing in the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, or Koran that says that its adherents must obey rabbis, priests, and imams. In fact, Judaism didn’t have rabbis until around the year 70 of the Common Era, after the second [...]