I don’t know about you, but until President Trump’s trip to the Middle East last month, I had never heard of a “sword dance.” Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, you’ll recall, were welcomed to Saudi Arabia at the Murabba Palace, near Riyadh, where they joined a lively group of Saudis clad in traditional…
We are living in an age when world leaders regularly deny historical facts — and therefore, defining what the word “lie” means is an urgent concern. It’s also an ancient concern. Both the Torah and the Talmud seem a bit clairvoyant these days in their interest in delineating what a lie is, when it’s okay…
Hundreds of women joined Women of the Wall for the group’s monthly Rosh Chodesh service, which included a Torah scroll smuggled in to the women’s section of the Western Wall. Among the some 300 women who assembled for the service on Thursday morning to mark the new Hebrew month of Iyar were those from nine…
Nine scrolls of Torah were snatched from the Maase Rokach synagogue in Brooklyn’s Midwood neighborhood Sunday morning – a break-in robbery that police said involved four thieves. According to The New York Times, the robbery took place early in the morning, and was only noticed later in the day, when someone in the synagogue observed…
“Which part of Torah do you want to study?” I asked Judy Clark at our first meeting. The gray-haired woman leaned across the table in the visitors’ room at Bedford Hills prison and answered immediately. “Isaiah.” she said. “I need to study Isaiah.” “Why?” I wondered. “Because I was just like him, believing I had…
In his Bar Mitzvah video, Adam Wolfond, a non-speaking autistic person who types to communicate, explores the story of Moses and the Golden Calf to ask: “Does the Torah book answer the reasons why I don’t talk?” Viewed as non-relational and unaware because of his autism label, Adam expresses his relationship to others, his environment…
(Reuters) – Prague’s medieval Old-New Synagogue received two new Torah scrolls on Sunday, the first ones since World War II shattered the country’s once-thriving Jewish community. The Torahs, funded by donations to the Prague Jewish community, were written in Israel and brought into the synagogue in a ceremony that included scripting of the final letters…
In this series I am responding to frequently asked questions about some gender-bending translations of Torah texts I have proposed in a few articles since 2008, and in a 2016 op-ed in The New York Times, “Is God Transgender?” So far, we have looked at Eve as “he;” Noah repairing to “her” tent; Rebecca, who…
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