This Is Your Brain on Conflict: The Problem of Polarized Communication

Amy Eilberg
The human world is today, as never before, split into two camps, each of which understands the other as the embodiment of falsehood and itself as the embodiment of truth. . . . Each side has assumed monopoly of the sunlight and has plunged its antagonist into night, and each side demands that you [...]

Whose Certainty? A Response to Shaul Magid

Yehiel Poupko
There is another perspective on the criminal behavior of a small group of highly insular Haredim in Beit Shemesh. Traveling to Israel recently on a rabbinic mission of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago were nearly two dozen Conservative, Orthodox, and Reform rabbis. We met with Yair Ettinger, who covers religious affairs for the [...]

Polarization: Now at the Fringes, but Endangering the Future

Kalman Neuman
Gloomy prophecies of polarization are endemic in the Jewish state: The Jewish proclivity for dissent, the transformations that our people have undergone in the past 200 years, the attempt to create a polity from an amalgam of immigrants while undergoing a constant military and political crisis — all make prognostications of schism easy.
What are [...]

The Price of Uncertainty

Shaul Magid
Many of us were deeply disturbed by the exhibition of Haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, zealotry in Beit Shemesh, a bedroom community outside Jerusalem, earlier this year. Many essays were written about the uncouth Haredim and their uncompromising beliefs, about the political ramifications of such egregious behavior in Israel’s public space, and about the decline of [...]

‘Black Bus’: The Pain of Defecting from the Fold

Toby Perl Freilich
Anat Zuria’s spare, eloquent and moving new film, “Black Bus,” is sure to fuel the roiling controversy over extreme gender segregation within Israeli ultra-Orthodox sectors. The conflict has provoked embarrassing comparisons between Jerusalem and Teheran, and sparked a critical debate on the tensions inherent in a free society’s commitment to protect cultural as [...]

The Set Table of Jewish Law: How the Shulhan Arukh Got Its Name

Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert

Of all the metaphorical tables in Jewish tradition, the Shulhan Arukh of Joseph Karo (1488-1575) is perhaps still the best known, even among secular Jews, because of its place in the history of Jewish literature. It was the last monumental codification of the long tradition of rabbinic law, still widely accepted in [...]

Let All Who Are Hungry Come and Eat — Really?

Josh Feigelson
For many, the verse in the Haggadah, “Kol dichfin yeitei v’yechul,” “Let all who are hungry come and eat” has come to be understood as referring to people who are spiritually hungry. Our empathy remains a work of imagination, its ethical impulse confined to the theater of the seder night. But what if we opened the door and went out to find hungry people to feed?

Occupying One Table

Aryeh Cohen
The “Occupation” encampments were premised on the idea of an open table at which everybody could eat. The occupation site served as an eruv, symbolizing both the conversation and engagement that is the stuff, the essence of democracy.

The Hasidic Table and the Rebbe: A Powerful Encounter

Shulem Deen
The tisch is where the rebbe eats his Shabbat evening meals. For the committed Hasid, it is the highlight of his week, when he will gather with his rebbe and his fellow Hasidim in an amalgamation of food, song, dance, prayer, and occasional words of inspiration. The rebbe will sit at the head of a large table with his male family members by his side, with the rest of the community arrayed, sitting or standing, around them.

Slow-Cooked Stews: The Foods We Eat and the Women Who Cook

Ruth Abusch-Magder
Long before the romance and fervor of the rebbe’s tisch, the table was a holy space for Jews — wherever they lived. When Judaism arose from the ashes of the destruction of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, every Jewish home became a “minor temple” and the table became the altar around which people gathered. While the rebbe held court at the table, the women sustained it.