Death and Dignity

Nov 14, 2025 By Gordon Tucker | Commentary | Hayyei Sarah

Parashat Hayyei Sarah begins with the death of the matriarch Sarah. Interestingly, it is the first time that a death enters into the Torah’s narrative. In all of the genealogies from Adam and Eve through the lives of Abraham and Sarah, deaths were matter-of-factly recorded with the simple word וימת. And of course, there was the global death and destruction during the Flood. But the death of Sarah is the first one that generates a story, and a template, as it were, for how to deal with death—burial, eulogizing, mourning, and the subsequent continuation of life.

Claiming Our Ancestors: The Case of Terah

Oct 31, 2025 By Eliezer B. Diamond z”l | Commentary | Lekh Lekha

For all of us, there is no going without leaving; and so it was for Abraham: “Go forth from your land, your birthplace, and the house of your father to the land that I shall show you” (Gen. 12:1) [emphasis added]. And when we leave places, we leave people as well. When Abraham departed for Canaan he left behind, among others, his father Terah. And it was always thus: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother” (2:24).

Species Purity and the Great Flood

Oct 24, 2025 By Daniel Nevins | Commentary | Noah

Omnicide is a dramatic move, on that we can all agree. But what causes the Creator to grow violently disgusted with the creatures that had just recently been praised as “good” and blessed with fertility? JTS Bible Professor Emeritus Alan Cooper has suggested that it was interspecies breeding of human women with divine creatures that angered God, and that it was Noah’s pure genealogy (“perfect in his generations”) that set him apart for salvation. The ancient Rabbis had a similar idea—it was crossbreeding between species that angered God and caused God to reboot with specimens that were still arranged “according to their families” (Gen. 8:19; see Midrash Tanhuma, Buber ed., Noah 11).

Impermanence, Empathy, and the Shadow of Faith

Oct 10, 2025 By Yitz Landes | Commentary | Sukkot

It can feel odd that just as it begins to get chilly, and just after the long High Holiday prayers may have left us wanting to simply stay home, we must go outside to sit in the sukkah—an impermanent dwelling that brings us closer to the elements. And it may seem odd that precisely at this moment of impermanence, the Jewish tradition places extra significance on the welcoming in of guests—hakhnasat orhim. Why is it that that we must now enter a place of discomfort? And why is it that we must be extra careful to welcome in guests at this time? In order to answer these questions, we can turn to the representation of Sukkot and its rituals in the Jewish mystical tradition, beginning with the Zohar.

Our Very Life

Oct 3, 2025 By Lilly Kaufman | Commentary | Ha'azinu

At the end of his life, with Joshua by his side, Moses begins his great, thunderous poem, Ha’azinu, summoning the heavens and the earth as witnesses to his powerful, angry message, as God commanded him to do in the preceding parashah, Vayelekh. And yet, in a one-verse reshut, a prayerful, wishful intention, preceding the central portion of his sermonic poem, he says that he wants his words to land lightly: “May my discourse come down as the rain, my speech distill as the dew, like showers on young growth, like droplets on the grass” (Deut. 32:2). Then suddenly, the central angry theme emerges, and he calls the people “unworthy of [God], crooked, perverse” (32:5), “dull and witless” (32:6). 

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.

When Teshuvah Feels Impossible

Sep 19, 2025 By Noam Blauer | Nitzavim | Rosh Hashanah

Are we really being set up for success for this whole teshuvah business? We might commit to doing all the preparation—journaling, going to shul, talking to therapists, chatting with rabbis, calling up hurt family and friends, New Year’s resolutions, etc.—and it still feels inadequate. Am I actually morally transformed? I am some infinitesimally small fraction of a hypermodern, global, complex network. My actions bear consequences for people on the other side of the globe I will never meet and whose names I will never even know. I still need to bring teshuvah to bear on my most intimate relationships,  but is this millennia-old process suitable to the messiness and uncertainty of modern moral life?

Family Matters

Sep 5, 2025 By Jonathan Milgram | Commentary | Ki Tetzei

Academic talmudists are often asked, “Of what use are the findings of academic Jewish Studies to lay people? Can historical research inform our contemporary dialogue on the pressing issues of our day?” I propose that developments in family law from biblical to Rabbinic times have much to teach us in our evaluating the rapidly changing values and their accompanying changing laws in our own times.

I begin in an unlikely place: the curious set of verses in this week’s parashah, Ki Tetzei, about filial favoritism: