S Blog: Hillel, Shammai, Certainty, and Hatred

BY: ALEX BRAVER
When in grade school, I first learned of the famous debate between the ancient rabbinic sages about Hanukkah: The House of Shammai ruled that we should light eight candles on the first night, seven on the second, and continue descending until the last night had one lonely candle remaining, while the House of [...]

S Blog: Eating at the Table of the Omnipresent

BY: ALEX BRAVER
There is a saying from Ethics of the Fathers (Pirkei Avot): “Three who dine at a table and exchange words of Torah, it is as if they ate from the table of the Omnipresent,” (3:4). So, seeing that our tisch has brought us to eat from God’s table, it only seems fitting to say the blessing for sustenance, Birkat Hamazon, afterwards.

S Blog: If you restrain your foot…

BY: ALEX BRAVER

I’ve learned that I, like many of us modern Jews, am addicted to STUFF…

Sh’ma Blog: Who Would God Vote For?

BY: ALEX BRAVER
Well, at first the Tanach seems to think that God would vote for nobody…or for God’s self.  After entering the Land, things don’t really go as planned—there is chaos and disorder, idolatry and wickedness—not the idyllic picture of a land flowing with milk and honey that the people expected when wandering the desert.  [...]

Sh’ma Blog: From When Do We Recite the Sh’ma in the Evening? Finding a Talmudic Theory of Jewish Practice

In most instruction manuals, you would expect to begin with an introduction, a table of contents, a definition of terms, some sort of systematic approach to whatever it is you’re about to learn. Yet, the Talmud begins seemingly in the middle of a discussion. It assumes a vast amount of background knowledge from the very first sentence. Without this background knowledge, the following discussion would be incomprehensible:

Sh’ma Blog: Who Wins, and Why: Rome or Persia?

BY: ALEX BRAVER
Somehow, I was not surprised when the first thing that came to mind after hearing that this month’s issue of Sh’ma would be about “Israel and the UN” was the Talmud…..

Rabbah b. Bar Hana in the name of R. Johanan, on the authority of R. Judah b. Illa’i, said: Rome is designed to fall into the hands of Persia….
Rab said: Persia will fall into the hands of Rome. Thereupon R. Kahana and R. Assi asked of Rab: (Shall) the builders fall into the hands of the destroyers? He said to them: Yes, it is the decree of the King. Others say: He replied to them: They [the Persians] too are guilty for they destroyed the synagogues.

Sh’ma Blog: Peah and a Modern Jewish Ethic for Giving

BY: ALEX BRAVER

One should not make the Peah less than one-sixtieth [of the field], and even though we said that there is no definite amount for Peah: it is all based upon the size of the field, the number of poor, and the abundance of the crop.

Sh’ma Blog: A Subversive Reading of the Akedah

BY: ALEX BRAVER
I wanted to pick up on Rabbi Dov Linzer’s point about our liturgical reminder of the Akedah in the morning blessings, a small paragraph that comes after the recitation of the entirety of this particular Biblical story each day.  When I first began engaging with these texts a few years ago, I felt [...]