Do You Need to Believe in God to Convert to Judaism?
October 12, 2022
For the Torah, “belief” does not mean “belief in the claim that something exists,” but rather is an expression of trust, loyalty, and dedication.
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.
The Three Books of Judgment
September 16, 2022
How do we maintain a belief in God’s goodness in a world where evil and misfortune exist?
Leonard Cohen Took Judaism Seriously
September 8, 2022
In 1964, at a symposium For English language Jewish writers, Leonard Cohen delivered a jeremiad against North American Judaism — a Judaism that had abandoned God in favor of bourgeois, assimilationist dreams.
Fundamentalist Chic
August 31, 2022
Jewish religious leaders should take note. Young people like sleek, modern design for our consumer electronics, yes, but not for our religion.
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.
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.
[authorpage]
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.