A Conversation on Creation and Evolution
Nov 17, 2009 By The Jewish Theological Seminary | Public Event video
One of the most hotly debated contradictions between the Bible and current scientific knowledge is creationism and Darwin’s theory of evolution. In this program, two leading philosophers, Lenn Goodman and Philip Kitcher, address this perceived conflict.
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Eternity in a Word
Jan 16, 2015 By Joel Alter | Commentary | Va'era
God’s name YHVH is the verb “to be” with the past, present, and future tenses folded into the same conjugation: Eternity or Being in a single word.
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The Wilderness Speaks
May 22, 2015 By Daniel Nevins | Commentary | Bemidbar
The summer after graduating college, I went backpacking with a friend in North Cascades National Park in Washington. The sun shone brightly on Lake Chelan as we were ferried deep into the woods, landing at the little outpost of Stehekin to begin our weeklong trek. It was a euphoric beginning, but soon both the weather and my mood grew darker.
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The Landscape of Revelation
Jan 2, 2016 By Eitan Fishbane | Commentary | Shemot
“Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. . .The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?…”
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Blessing and Curse
Aug 21, 2013 By Arnold M. Eisen | Commentary | Ki Tavo
This week’s portion contains some of the highest highs and lowest lows in the entire Torah—or in any other work of literature, for that matter. At the start of the parashah, Israelites in the wilderness are asked to picture what it will be like to testify, from inside the Land of Israel, that they have seen God’s promises of blessing fulfilled. At the end of the parashah, those same Israelites are subjected to 54 verses of terrifying curses detailing the punishments awaiting them “if you fail to observe faithfully all the terms of this Teaching” (Deut. 28:58).
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God’s Earth: Between Blessing and Curse
May 15, 2015 By Arnold M. Eisen | Commentary | Behar | Behukkotai
Here is Leviticus—in many ways the most intimate of the Torah’s five books, because it usually meets us frail, mortal, human beings where we live, in our skins and with our families, in private spaces of home and tabernacle—instructing us as a society, as a species, that divine blessings of rain and sun will turn to curses if we do not do our part in stewarding God’s earth properly. The text insists that a fateful choice is in our hands. And it seems far from confident that we will make the choice wisely.
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Species Purity and the Great Flood
Oct 24, 2014 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?
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Yours? Mine? Ours? Economies for a Sustainable Earth
Apr 25, 2013 By The Jewish Theological Seminary | Public Event video
A panel discussion sponsored by the Louis Finkelstein Institute for Religious and Social Studies of JTS.
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