America is obsessed with slavery and its ramifications and rightly so. But it is less concerned with the idea of freedom and what that means. Both these ideas, slavery and freedom are crucial to the significance of Pesach or Passover as it is more commonly known in English. They are two sides of one coin, that of the human condition.…
General Topics
Failed Priests and Prophets
There seems to me to be a permanent state of conflict in all religions between religious authority and individual spirituality or mysticism. Authority values conformity, control, and stability, whereas mystics have invariably been individualists who have challenged the established structures and encouraged different ways of interacting with the world and its mysteries. Invariably the non-conformist individualists have been isolated, excluded,…
Mazal
I was reading the Roman historian Suetonius (around 69-122 CE) on the twelve Roman Caesars, and I came across this, “Tiberius abolished foreign cults in Rome particularly the Egyptian and Jewish, forcing all those who embraced superstitions to burn their religious vestments and other accessories.” I couldn’t help but laugh. Rome was the most superstitious of cultures and Suetonius himself…
The Lesson of Ukraine
The brutal violence of Putin ( against dissidents as well as Ukraine) cannot be justified on any moral grounds whatsoever. The indiscriminate murder of women and children trapped and unable to escape, sheltering from constant bombing, the dislocation of millions of refugees, and the sheer evil of the revolting Putin defies all human standards of decency. All wars are horrible…
Superstition
I have always said that what’s wrong with Judaism is not the ideas or the texts, but the people who misapply or distort them. Of course, you could say that too about every philosophy, every political theory, and every institution. When it comes to religious experience, I side with the mystics. But when it comes to practice, I am a…
Did it Really Happen?
The Book of Esther is a great story, of incompetent government, attempted genocide, personal intrigue, salvation, and celebration. A clash of cultures between a drunken, self-indulgent, material regime, and a pious, God-fearing, restrained alternative. Goodies versus baddies. Neither Jewish nor Persian evidence sheds any light on the historicity. Was it true and does that matter? Given that rabbinic sources were…