Sublime

Kamtza and Bar Kamtza are like matter and antimatter, thesis and synthesis, light and shadow. To hate one and love the other is to lose sight of the essential similarity between the two, and thereby to engage in a useless and all-consuming kind of violence. The War of Gog and Magog, and all struggles for total annihilation, emerge from the clash of

“The Orthodox Jewish community is third world in theology and philosophy. Having a political state of Israel now, I’m convinced the great religious challenge is going to be the pluralist issue. Each culture can no longer present itself as self-evident.”

when all Jews have access to the entire marketplace of ideas and beliefs, an authentic sense of being Jewish—of Jewishness—requires living as a Jew, doing Jewish in some way.

As we shall see, the "Hebrew Bible" and the "Old Testament" differ in more than name only They comprise different numbers of books, which they place in a different order. (The ordering matters because it alters the context in which we understand the text; a book's meaning can shift depending upon which books we read before and a

of center and Israel’s center-right.

So many of our expectations of literature are based on Christianity—and not just Christianity, but the precise points at which Christianity and Judaism diverge. And then I noticed something else: the canonical works by authors in Jewish languages almost never give their readers any of those things.

rabbis as teachers are in critical demand. And after a year running Hadar, I knew that my life’s focus was not only to build one specific community but also to spread the model of Empowered Judaism.

We are calling it a yeshiva to reclaim the cultural valence of the term—an intellectual and spiritual center where Torah radiates forth into the broader community, and the community feeds back into the yeshiva.