Learning How to Read on Shavuot
June 2, 2022
The Torah remains our greatest inheritance and our heaviest piece of baggage—simultaneously an elixir of life and an elixir of death depending on the spirit in which it is imbibed.
Matthew Schultz
Matthew Schultz is the author of the essay collection “What Came Before” (2020). He is a rabbinical student at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts.
An Idiot Abroad on Yom HaZikaron
May 3, 2022
The atmosphere of Memorial Day in Israel speaks to the fact that, in Israel, history runs wild in the streets.
On Impermanence: The Two Sanctuaries
April 14, 2022
The Exodus story — recounted each year at Pesach seders around the world — tells the story of the Israelites’ two great sanctuaries.
Torah Study for the End of the World: Confronting Mortality
March 23, 2022
A common critique of religion is that it exists only to blunt our fear of death through the deployment of comforting fairytales, replacing life’s great and unsettling unknowns with visions of an afterlife which are — if not less unsettling — at least less unknown.
Torah Study for the End of the World
February 3, 2022
Being a rabbinical student, Torah study was already a regular part of my daily life. For my father, aunt, uncle and brother, however, the unmediated Hebrew Bible was foreign territory.
Unscrolled: Israel Past and Future
January 6, 2022
The generation of the exodus is commanded to imagine that their lives are part of a story. In so doing, they cast their eyes forward to the generations of the distant future: to us.
Unscrolled: The Hardened Heart
December 31, 2021
If God has “hardened” or, in some instances, “strengthened” Pharaoh’s heart, is this to say that God violated Pharoah’s free will?
Unscrolled: The God of Nighttime
December 22, 2021
The jagged and gargantuan architecture of mountains implies nothing particularly gentle about their architect.
Unscrolled Vayechi: Disrupting the Natural Order
December 17, 2021
We are being set up by the text to anticipate a recurrence of this eternally recurring motif—the overturn of primogeniture—in which the younger sibling attains the blessing and privilege due the older.
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