Tanakh and Allegory
Someone on scjm asked the following question: Mainly for those who think some of the tanach is parable Tanach parable or historical? How much is parable & how much is historical? all parable? parable...
Aspaqlaria Blog
Qitzur Shulchan Arukh 62:2
ב: כשם שיש אסור אונאה במשא ומתן, כך יש אסור אונאה בשכירות ובקבלנות ובחילוף מטבע Just as there is a prohibition of cheating in buying and selling, so too there is a prohibition of...
Qitzur Shulchan Arukh 62:1
סִימָן סב – הִלְכוֹת מַשָּׂא וּמַתָּן Chapter 62: Laws of Buying and Selling א: צריך לזהר מאד שלא להונות את חברו. וכל המאנה את חברו, בין שהמוכר מאנה את הלוקח, בין שהלוקח מאנה את...
How Should I Respond? — Part II: Email from Agudah
I received the following in my email box. I am heartened to see that we as a community are seeking constructive response. I am writing to friends and supporters of Agudath Israel to call...
How Should I Respond?
When they gossip in Vilna, they desecrate Shabbos in Paris. – Rav Yisrael Salanter Some take Rav Yisrael Salanter’s causality to be metaphysical. I don’t think that fits R’ Yisrael’s general approach to life....
Parashas Matos and Kol Nidre
My neighbor, R’ Eli Radinsky, recently drew the following similarity to my attention. There is an obligation to begin add time to Yom Kippur, an obligation true of Shabbos and every holiday, but happens...
Finding Spirituality
R’ Rich Wolpoe shared with us on Avodah this challenge: My friend’s thesis is that Judaism w/o Qabbalah or Hassidus is mechanical and lifeless. And so he challenged me as follows: To List aspects...
TiDE and Slabodka
(The previous post was off topic, but on the blog. This post is on topic, but posted elsewhere.) Rabbi Rich Wolpoe posted to the Nishma blog an exchange we had by email. Here are...
Natural Morality and Halakhah
What’s the relationship between a human’s intuitive sense of what’s moral and halachic mandate? There is a tendency in some circles to describe the Torah as though halakhah was the sum total of the...
1984, NewSpeak and the Holy Language
A long while back I wrote some thoughts on the dispute between the Ramban and the Rambam about what makes Hebrew the holy language, in the context of a general dispute over the context...
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