Baruch Spinoza Borrowed His Basic Philosophy from ibn Ezra and Maimonides Non-Jews consider Baruch (or Benedict) de Spinoza an esteemed philosopher. Many feel that he breathed fresh air into philosophy and helped launch the open-minded enlightenment in the seventeenth century. Rebecca Goldstein, in her 2006 [...]
The Wisdom of Solomon and Us The Quest for Meaning, Morality and a Deeper Relationship with God By Rabbi Dr. Marc D. Angel Jewish Lights Publishing, 2016, 204 pages The Bible describes God granting King Solomon the gift of wisdom. As a result, a tradition ascribes the authorship of the three biblical books Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, [...]
Is Rashi’s Bible Commentary Rational? Certainly Rabbi SolomonYitzchaqi (or Shlomo ben Isaac, 1040–1105), known by the acronym Rashi because of the initials of his name, is the [...]
The Israelites may not have known about Moses' Torah until around 620 BCE It appears that the Israelites knew nothing about Moses' Torah before a book of the Torah was found in the Temple around 620 BCE, a story told in II Kings 22. Scholars contend that there [...]
Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik Confrontation and other Essays Maggid Books, 2015, 121 pages This book contains five rather brief essays by Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903-1993) who was and still is considered by many one of the leading rabbinical figure of Modern Orthodox Judaism. Many books are written about him and by him. [...]
Why Do Rabbis Prefer the Shulchan Arukh over Maimonides’ Code of Law? Maimonides’ fourteen-volume Mishneh Torah was the first, most comprehensive, most readable, and best-organized code of Jewish law. It is no surprise, for example, that the fourteen books of his code are so expertly crafted [...]
Judaism does not know when a day begins It should be obvious that a new day begins when the previous day end. But it is not so in Judaism. Why? According [...]
The first paragraph of Pirkei Avot does not say what people think it says The first paragraph of Pirkei Avot, The Ethics of the Fathers, states: Moses received Torah from Sinai And [...]
The Ethics of the Talmud Sayings of the Fathers Pirke Aboth Text, Complete Translation and Commentaries By R. Travers Herford Schocken Books, 1962, 176 pages There are dozens of commentaries in many languages on the Talmudic book of ethics called in Hebrew Pirke Aboth and known in English as Ethics of the Fathers, although [...]
Why Was the First Passover Different [...]
Demons and Sympathetic Magic in the Passover Seder I spoke in the past about the ancient Jews believing in demons, the power of sympathetic magic (doing something on earth that causes heaven [...]
A Passover Joke A British Jew is waiting in line to be knighted by the Queen. He is to kneel in [...]
Sage Advice Pirkei Avot By Irving (Yitz) Greenberg Maggid Books, 2016, 338 pages If a publisher was searching for a translator and commentator of the famed book of moral teachings called Pirkei Avot in Hebrew and Ethics of the Fathers in English, meaning traditional Jewish moral ideas, the publisher would find no one [...]
Reasonable interpretations of the Torah by Nachmanides Many of Nachmanides’ views are reasonable, more reasonable than those by Rashi, but many are not, for Nachmanides felt that the only truth was Kabbalah. The following are some of his reasonable [...]
Torah and Western Thought Edited by Soloveichik, Halpern, & Zuckier Maggid Books, 2015, 329 pages In this age when pulpit rabbis speak almost solely about medrish (despite the correct form being midrash) and the moralistic comments by medieval Bible and Talmud commentators rather than the true meaning of the biblical words and statements, it [...]
What is Kitniyot and should we observe the practice? Jewish ancestors developed some laws that go beyond and are more restrictive than what the Torah demands. Among other reasons, they did so out of a [...]
Nachmanides’ View of Himself Most rabbis consider the twelfth century Spanish rabbi Nachmanides one of Judaism’s greatest thinkers. Many do so without knowing [...]
The phenomena of two sons One of the many ways to better understand and enjoy scriptures is to stop [...]
Abraham, Son of Maimonides [...]
Esther is not as Simple as People Think The biblical book Esther, like Ruth, is one of the five Megilloth, scrolls that are read in synagogues [...]
The very strange story of the witch of En-dor I Samuel 28 has a remarkable story that is clearly contrary to the current thinking of most Jews [...]
Today, March 17, is my dad’s birthday. He would have been 110 today. One of the best ways to remember dad is to tell his story, as well as mom’s. Rabbi Dr. Nathan and Celia Drazin My dad passed away in 1976 at age 70, but his story remains. [...]
What is Man? Mark Twain is widely known as a humorist, but there is one very serious book that he wrote, “What is Man?” He held off publishing the book for many years and constantly made changes in it because he felt, correctly, that people would reject his ideas, and he later [...]
Did Ruth Convert? Many rabbis insisted that Ruth, and perhaps even Orpah converted to Judaism, although the rabbis did not agree when this occurred. There are good reasons to think that the concept of conversion did not exist during the time of Ruth and was only introduced into Judaism around 125 BCE. [...]
Rabbis changed the Law of Self-Incrimination Virtually all biblical laws were changed. Even Moses altered some commands contained in the first four books of the Torah just before the Israelites entered Canaan under the leadership of Joshua. He did so because his nation was leaving a desert existence where the nation [...]
Did the Sun Stand Still for Joshua at Gibeon? Joshua 10 narrates an astounding story. Joshua, Moses’ successor. and the Israelite forces fought against five southern Canaanite kingdoms and defeated them. Then Joshua sang a song praising God for causing the sun to stand still over the city of Gibeon and extending [...]
More on the Post-Moses Era Possibly Not Knowing about Moses' Torah As I previously stated,[1] scholars insist that there is no indication in the biblical books that the Israelites knew about Moses’s Torah or observed the laws contained in it until the time of King Josiah (641–609 BCE). An example is the Mishkan [...]
A horrible act alleged to be Jewish Outrageously, a supposedly pious Orthodox Jewish man mistreated the wife of my deceased partner, my co-author on many Targum Onkelos books, Rabbi Dr. Stanley Wagner. On December 4, 2015, his wife Renee Rabinowitz boarded an El Al plane in Newark, New Jersey, for a flight [...]
God and Politics in Esther By Yoram Hazony Cambridge University Press, 2016, 262 pages + Hebrew of Esther Hazony offers readers a revised and expanded version of his 1995 book “The Dawn,” which was subtitled “Political Teachings of the Book of Esther,” and gives us one of the best commentaries written on the biblical [...]
A true story and a joke About sixty years ago, I went to Yeshiva University in New York where I studied for a year and a half before I transferred to Ner Israel Rabbinical College in Baltimore. I had a somewhat outspoken Rebbe at YU. One day a student entered our [...]
