Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify.  “When a man or woman shall commit any sin that men commit, to do a trespass against the Lord, and that person be guilty; then they shall confess their sin which they have done: and he shall make restitution […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify.  Tonight begins Rosh Hashanah, when Jewish communities celebrate the new year and, as part of this celebration, read chapter 22 of Genesis. This contains the famous story in which God asks Abraham to take his son Isaac to a […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify.  On October 27, 2018, a gunman burst into the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, armed with a Colt AR-15 semi-automatic rifle and three Glock .357 semi-automatic pistols. He executed eleven Jews at prayer. When police arrived, they shot […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify.  Perhaps more than any other major religious tradition, Judaism is mediated through words. God first communicated to Abraham through intelligible speech. Moses brought down from Mount Sinai tablets inscribed with words codifying the structure of Jewish moral order. The […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify.  In the 6th century BCE, the kingdom of Judah and its capitol in Jerusalem were besieged by the Babylonian forces of Nebuchadnezzar II. After a long period of deprivation, the walls of the city were finally breached. On the […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  It’s sometimes argued that, as material, political, and economic conditions improve in a society, that society tends to grow less religious. Polls have seemed to demonstrate for years the validity of this argument in America. Gallup, for instance, […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  One of the great debates in the history of Jewish theology is about how to reconcile two contradictory truths. First, that God is beyond human comprehension, and—unlike pagan deities—does not have a corporeal presence and is not subject […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  “Prayer is the language of the soul in conversation with God. It is the most intimate gesture of the religious life, and the most transformative.” Those lines are from an essay called “Understanding Jewish Prayer” by Jonathan Sacks, […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  To understand the inner life of the biblical world, one must look to Egypt. In the Hebrew Bible, it plays a role in the psyche of the Jews as the great other, the great alternative. Thus, when the […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  Some of today’s most important ideas were first born in little magazines—magazines, that is to say, like Mosaic. How does that happen? And what is the role of a magazine editor, and does that role differ if the magazine […]