JTS Torah Commentary

When It’s Easier to Hide: Jonah, Antisemitism, and Moral Courage

Sep 29, 2025 By Shuly Rubin Schwartz | Public Event video | Video Lecture | Yom Kippur

As we prepare for the Days of Awe, the Book of Jonah calls us not only to repentance, but to responsibility—especially in a fractured and fearful world. In this session, Chancellor Shuly Rubin Schwartz explored Jonah’s reluctance to engage, his desire to retreat, and God’s challenge to him—and to us. The Book of Jonah summons us to engage and build bridges—even with those who may seem distant or hostile. This session engaged what it means to be brave and morally grounded when it would be easier to turn away—and how, like Jonah, each of us has the power to make a difference. 

The Meaning of Kol Nidre: Human Frailty, Inclusive Community, and the Gravity of Words

Sep 26, 2025 By Shira Billet | Commentary | Yom Kippur

The Kol Nidre service, with its solemn choreography and somber traditional melody,[1] ushers in Yom Kippur with a sobering reminder of the gravity of speech and the importance of honoring our words, setting the tone for a long day of fasting, repentance, and communal prayer.

Jews, Non-Jews, and the Purpose of the High Holidays

Sep 16, 2025 By David C. Kraemer | Public Event video | Video Lecture | Rosh Hashanah | Yom Kippur

The Amidah for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur presents a striking, even radical, vision: a world where God alone reigns, where all people—Jewish and not—live in peace, and oppressive regimes vanish. In this vision, the Jewish people are neither erased nor centered. Instead, they are part of a broader human hope. 

Beyond the Sermon: What the High Holiday Prayers Offer and Demand

Sep 8, 2025 By Jan Uhrbach | Public Event video | Video Lecture | Rosh Hashanah | Yom Kippur

We begin our High Holiday webinar series with guidance for how to engage more meaningfully in the prayer part of High Holiday services. Famously long and repetitive, services on these days may sometimes feel overwhelming, boring, or even alienating. In this session, Rabbi Jan Uhrbach, Director of the Block / Kolker Center for Spiritual Arts at JTS, offered practical strategies for participating more fully, and insight into what these services really ask of us and what they offer—especially in tumultuous uncertain times. Along the way, Rabbi Uhrbach will share some of her favorite passages in the Conservative Movement’s Machzor Lev Shalem, for which she was a member of the Editorial Committee. Whether you’re a seasoned prayergoer or showing up with hesitation, this session will help you begin the High Holiday season with openness, intention, and agency.

Black North, White West: Color, Grief, and the Geography of the Soul

Aug 1, 2025 By Marcus Mordecai Schwartz | Commentary | Devarim | Tishah Be'av | Yom Kippur

There’s a tradition in ancient Semitic languages of mapping the world with colors. The north is black. The south is red. The west is white. The east—sometimes blue, sometimes green. In Arabic, the Mediterranean is still called al-baḥr al-abyaḍ al-mutawassiṭ—the White Middle Sea. The Red Sea is to the south. The Black Sea lies to the north.

JTS High Holiday Webinars 2025

Jul 14, 2025

The High Holidays invite us into a season of profound reflection—not only on who we are as individuals, but on how we show up for one another and the world. This three-part webinar series explores the emotional and spiritual heart of this sacred time, focusing on the themes of vulnerability, responsibility, and connection.

Together, we’ll consider what it means to pray with presence, to engage meaningfully with others—even across difference—and to see these days not just as a personal journey, but as a call to collective transformation. Whether you are returning to familiar rituals or seeking a new way in, this series offers space to reflect, connect, and prepare with intention.

More Than the Motions

Oct 13, 2024 By Joel Seltzer | Commentary | Yom Kippur

The haftarah, from Isaiah chapter 57, was chosen precisely to prevent the type of self-congratulatory behavior that we humans exhibit when we play the “dutiful child,” while simultaneously managing to miss our larger purpose.

Sacred Words in Liturgy and Life

Oct 11, 2024 By Shira Billet | Commentary | Rosh Hashanah | Yom Kippur

Human communication, the commitment to taking words seriously and to viewing the words we write and speak as serious commitments, has become even more imperiled in an age where our words are mediated through the technologies of social media, artificial intelligence, and the crippling social phenomena of political polarization and widespread mistrust.

Repentence and the Mystical ‘Rope’: The Divine/Human Relationship in Jewish Thought

Sep 16, 2024 By Shira Billet | Public Event video | Video Lecture | Rosh Hashanah | Yom Kippur

One of the most striking images of the divine-human relationship in Jewish thought is the kabbalistic image of a rope or cord that extends from God in the heavens into the soul of the human being. We explore a diverse array of Jewish thinkers over the centuries who have found this metaphor meaningful, especially in times of challenge and suffering, giving them hope to continue to strive to become closer to God. In the context of the High Holiday season, we give special attention to connections between this metaphor and themes and liturgies of the High Holiday season.

Sha‘ar Bat Rabim

Sep 16, 2024 By Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary | Rosh Hashanah | Yom Kippur

Sha‘ar Bat Rabim is an extraordinary manuscript/printed-book hybrid that vividly illustrates the concept of the “lives of books.“ This volume, originally printed in Venice, serves as a prayer book for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur according to the Ashkenazic rite.

Petition or Protest

Aug 30, 2024 By Adam Zagoria-Moffet | Commentary | Re'eh | Rosh Hashanah | Yom Kippur

Our Sages saw Hannah as trying to trap God into offering blessing, and they interpreted the same from another unlikely context, one that also occurs during this month’s Torah readings. We read about the apparently bizarre mitzvah of shilu’ah haken, the sending away of the mother bird. Deut. 22:6–7 is the sole description of this shockingly precise mitzvah: “If you happen upon a bird’s nest while on the road, whether in a tree or on the ground, whether with chicks in it or still-unhatched eggs, and the mother bird is sitting on the eggs or chicks, you shall not take the mother with the young. Instead, chase away the mother bird and take the young—in order that you be well and your days long.”

The Yom Kippur Avodah as a Template for Spiritual Practice 

Sep 19, 2023 By Eliezer B. Diamond z”l | Public Event video | Video Lecture | Yom Kippur

It is generally thought that the Yom Kippur Haftarah taken from Isaiah is supposed to be read as being in tension with the Torah reading from Aharei Mot (Leviticus 16).  While the Torah reading focuses almost exclusively on the rites performed by the High Priest in the Temple on Yom Kippur, Isaiah declaims that the ritual piety without social justice and Shabbat observance is nothing more than worthless hypocrisy. 

While this observation has merit, it can encourage the view that ritual has no ethical or spiritual content. In this session we see that the Avodah, the Temple rites, can indeed serve as a model for a life of spiritual discipline.

Clay in the Potter’s Hand

Sep 15, 2023 By Joel Seltzer | Commentary | Yom Kippur

Several years back, my wife and I took a summer vacation on Block Island, a 17-mile sanctuary of beaches, water, and biking off the southern coast of Rhode Island. We checked into a lovely bed and breakfast and made our way down the path towards our secluded beach cottage. The room was tiny, but a […]

The Torah of the New Year

Sep 6, 2023 By The Jewish Theological Seminary | Public Event video | Video Lecture | Rosh Hashanah | Shemini Atzeret | Yom Kippur

Join JTS faculty for a close reading of several of the biblical texts that we read during the fall holiday season. Discover new insights into these readings and reflect on what meanings they hold for us today.

Exile and Return as a Spiritual Paradigm

Sep 6, 2023 By Mychal Springer | Public Event video | Video Lecture | Rosh Hashanah | Yom Kippur

The haftarot of the High Holidays link personal teshuvah with the return to the land of Israel.  When we hold these two returnings together the spiritual and communal dimensions of teshuvah come into powerful focus. We explore the exiles of our soul and pathways of return in this season of teshuvah.

The Courage to Hope

Sep 30, 2022 By Rabbi Ayelet Cohen | Commentary | Shabbat Shuvah | Vayeilekh | Rosh Hashanah | Yom Kippur

Shabbat Shuvah represents the place between hope and fear; between transformation and unrealized aspirations. We may have made big promises on Rosh Hashanah, resolving to make significant changes in our lives, entering the year with a sense of excitement and optimism. But as Yom Kippur draws closer, we become more attuned to our own shortcomings. So much is beyond our control. Changing old patterns is arduous, the path uncertain. Confronting our own limitations, we can feel afraid and alone. The spiritual work of this moment lies in discerning the difference between acknowledging our limitations and succumbing to fear.

Confronting Our “Concealed Things”

Sep 23, 2022 By Gordon Tucker | Commentary | Nitzavim | Rosh Hashanah | Yom Kippur

The concealed things concern the Lord our God; but with overt matters, it is for us and our children ever to apply all the provisions of this Teaching. (Deut. 29:28)
There is, however, another reading of this verse, given by Nahmanides (Ramban), in the 13th century, and it is one that forces us to a certain deeper level of introspection at this time of year.

Here’s a paraphrase of what he says: The “concealed things” are not sins committed by others that are out of our view, and thus out of our control. Rather, they are the sins committed by us, but that are nevertheless out of our view and awareness. As long as we are not aware of them, they will be known only to God. But they are only out of our control because they are not known to us.

Atonement: An Interplay Between the Individual and the Community

Sep 13, 2021 By Gordon Tucker | Video Lecture | Yom Kippur

A central feature of Yom Kippur is the act of atonement, or “at-one-ment.” But with whom should we seek to be “at one”? With God, with Israel, or with ourselves? In this session, we explored both the individual and collective aspects of this holy day, with special attention to Unetaneh Tokef, the Yom Kippur confession, and other liturgical features of the season.

Tip the Scales

Sep 18, 2020 By Shuly Rubin Schwartz | Commentary | Rosh Hashanah | Yom Kippur

“—who will live and who will die . . . who will come to an untimely end . . . . who by plague . . . who will be brought low, and who will be raised up?” (U-netaneh Tokef, from the High Holiday liturgy)

In my earliest memory of this prayer, I am a young girl standing between my mother and grandmother in synagogue amidst hundreds of others. Both women are sobbing uncontrollably, as they recited these words. I was puzzled by their outward display of anguish but knew enough not to interrupt them to ask what caused it. They grasped in a way I had yet to comprehend just how tenuous life is; they understood that this one prayer more than any other captures the fragility of human life that the Days of Awe magnify.

5781 High Holiday Message

Sep 18, 2020 By Shuly Rubin Schwartz | Short Video | Rosh Hashanah | Yom Kippur

Chancellor Schwartz shares her thoughts on the 5781 High Holiday season.