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How Did Simchat Torah Become One of the Most Beloved Jewish Holidays?
Simchat Torah is an anomaly on the Jewish calendar. The festival, which celebrates the completion of the yearly cycle of public Torah reading, doesn’t appear in the Bible or even the Talmud. The...
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Article 47
• For a strange and degrading appearance on Lopez Tonight, Larry David took a DNA test and host George Lopez revealed that the comedian “really is a bad Jew,” as he is, supposedly, 37 percent Native...
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Article 46
Hey, you know what you shouldn’t be paying retail for this holiday season? Torahs. According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, discount giant Costco is going to start selling a special edition at...
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Article 45
The oldest surviving complete Torah scroll from pre-Inquisition Spain was sold at Sotheby’s yesterday to an unnamed American private collector for $398,500—not quite the half-million bucks the auction...
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Article 44
• Turkeys aren’t the only animals that should be shaking in their boots this week. Israel and the Jewish community in Senegal have donated 99 sheep to needy Muslim families there to sacrifice for the...
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Article 43
Of the many sins of modern journalism, there are few I hate more than the wretched stunt of asymmetrical historical comparisons. No doubt you’ve seen this black magic practiced before, and most likely,...
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Article 42
Having inadvertently messed up the schedule by writing about this week’s haftorah last week, I decided to take this opportunity and reflect on what I’ve learned in two years of reading and writing...
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Article 41
While every Torah may be a sacred document, when it comes to provenance, a scroll that survived the Holocaust is the holy grail, so to speak. The Central Synagogue in Manhattan has been home to one...
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Why Shavuot is All But Ignored Across America
When it comes to theological significance, the late-spring festival of Shavuot is no slouch: The event it commemorates—God giving the Torah to the Jews at Mount Sinai—is arguably the most pivotal in...
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Article 39
A Torah owned by the Upper East Side’s Central Synagogue that purportedly had been used by Auschwitz prisoners may not actually have come from the camp. So, Save a Torah, a Rockville, Maryland-based...
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Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, Jewish Law, and the Principle of Binding...
During Elena Kagan’s June confirmation hearings, the newly confirmed associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court twice addressed questions relating to her Jewishness. Sen. Lindsey Graham asked Kagan,...
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Safer Torah: An Illustrated Look at Torah Theft and Torah Protection
Continue reading "Safer Torah: An Illustrated Look at Torah Theft and Torah Protection" at...
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Article 36
When she was 11 years old, Adi Altschuler saw an ad on TV. In it, a sweet looking girl—Adi thought she was about the same age as herself—stared dolefully at the screen. Zooming out, the camera revealed...
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Article 35
David Be’eri is a man of action. A career officer in the Israel Defense Forces, in the 1980s he was the deputy commander of Duvdevan, an elite unit dedicated, in large part, to arresting Palestinians...
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Article 34
Of all the absurdities we lovingly call journalism, my favorite bit of intellectual calisthenics is the “X—It’s Just Like Y!” routine. Here’s how it’s done: Choose a hotly contested topic (abortion,...
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Article 33
As this week’s parasha begins, Jacob, having just swindled his brother out of his birthright and his blessing, is on the lam, en route to cool his heels in Haran for a while. Before he can get there,...
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Article 32
This week “Blessed Week Ever” welcomes a guest columnist. I first learned about Devorah—the judge, prophetess, and heroine of this week’s haftorah—as a fourth-grader at an all-girls yeshiva in...
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Article 31
My husband and children were flummoxed when I told them I’d be presenting three sessions at Limmud NY—a three-day gathering of Jewish rabbis, educators, thinkers, artists, and enthusiasts who study and...
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Article 30
America and England, an old joke has it, are divided by a common language. In the same way, you could say that Judaism and Christianity are divided by a common Bible—except that, historically speaking,...
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Article 29
A lot has been recently written about happiness. Books like Stumbling on Happiness, The Politics of Happiness, and the best-selling The Happiness Project posit that happiness is something that can be...
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Article 28
The task of interviewing rabbinic giant Adin Steinsaltz, 74, is a bit daunting. Described by Newsweek as a “genius of the highest order,” Steinsaltz has authored more than 60 books and 600 essays,...
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Article 27
In The Shadow of the Sun, his masterwork of reportage from Africa, the Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski offered an observation by way of explaining some of the major cultural chasms separating the...
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Article 26
In what should come as a surprise to no one, Menachem Youlus was arrested yesterday on charges of fraud, specifically mail and wire fraud, and embezzlement of funds from his Save a Torah charity, which...
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An Orthodox Jew Pushes Jewish Environmentalism
Sukkot, which begins later this week, celebrates the end of the harvest season. People decorate their sukkahs with branches and fruits as a way of giving thanks for the season’s bounty. Yet Jews...
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A Woman Learns the Art of Torah Chanting
For generations, Saturday mornings at most synagogues sounded the same. After the Shaharit, or morning service, was completed, and after the Torah was paraded around and rested on the bimah and...
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What Are Shepherd’s Ethics? According to Yoram Hazony, The Key To Judaism
As co-founder and now a senior fellow of the Shalem Center, a leading Zionist think tank in Jerusalem, Yoram Hazony has sought a bridge between secular nationalism and Jewish religion. His latest book,...
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The Ancient Rabbis Would Have Supported Gun Control
The tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School has sparked passionate debate about whether or not we need stricter gun-control laws in this country—and the Jewish community is no exception. For every...
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Why First Responders Are Jewish Heroes
There is an image from the yesterday’s nightmare in Boston which I cannot get out of my mind, probably because it’s at once both horrific and holy. As first responders ran towards the victims of the...
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What’s the Difference Between the Samaritan Torah and Jewish One? Thousands...
While Jews study a number of religious books—from the Talmud to the Shulchan Aruch—the text that provides the religion’s very foundation is the Torah. And the version of the Torah most commonly studied...
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Daybreak
• The University of Bologna has a Kosher section in its library that includes a very recently discovered Torah. The complete scroll is thought to be more than 850 years old, making it the world’s...
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Robert Alter's Masterful Translations of the Bible as Literature
The Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible was completed in the 3rd century B.C.E., under circumstances that, according to tradition, were plainly miraculous. The King of Egypt invited 72 Jewish sages...
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Minds Full of Torah, Bowls Full of Sacrificial Blood: Our Literary Critic's...
Literary critic Adam Kirsch is reading a page of Talmud a day, along with Jews around the world. Reading Daf Yomi this week, I learned the answer to a question I had been wondering about since starting...
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Orthodox Scholars Try To Reconcile Biblical Scholarship With Traditional Beliefs
“Virtually all of the stories in the Torah are ahistorical,” declares a manifesto posted in July on TheTorah.com. “Given the data to which modern historians have access,” the essay explains, “it is...
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Jews in Exile: Our Literary Critic's Daf Yomi Talmud Study
Literary critic Adam Kirsch is reading a page of Talmud a day, along with Jews around the world. Rav Huna, I noted in last week’s column, did not have the best manners: The Talmud described him as...
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The People of the Book vs The People of the Kindle
The other day, my friend John said he was getting rid of almost all his books. By the time I visited his apartment, he’d already pruned his library by a quarter, dumping most of it in the garbage. “I...
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1482 Torah Sold for Record $3.87 Million
Torah going once, Torah going twice, Torah sold–for $3.87 million. At an auction in Paris this past Wednesday, a chumash from 1482 broke the record for the most expensive Hebrew-language book ever...
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Torah-Writing Robot Speeds Past Human Scribes in Berlin
Life would be so much easier if we had robots to take care of our most arduous, time-consuming tasks, right? A new installation at the Jewish Museum Berlin takes that notion one step further,...
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Noah's Ark Should Have Been Round
In 2009, a visitor to the British Museum presented curator Irving Finkel with a fascinating artifact—a 4,000-year-old Babylonian cuneiform tablet that told of a flood, and an ark, but with mysterious...
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A Torah Finds a New Home—and Invigorates a Congregation—in Shanghai During...
A well-traveled Torah relic rescued from Nazi Germany has made its way to China—via Brazil—to serve a lay-led liberal congregation in Shanghai, China, that was in need of a Torah in order to conduct...
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Female Artists Reinterpret the Torah in ‘Women of the Book’
When North Carolina native Shoshana Gugenheim moved to Israel in 2000, she began meeting with a Haredi tutor who agreed to teach her the ancient art of Torah writing. But since Jewish law declares holy...
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Purim, the Invention of Anti-Semitism, and the Celebration of Jewish Creativity
Purim is the closest Judaism gets to carnival. We are enjoined to get bashed and boozed, tight and tipsy to the point that we cannot distinguish Haman from Mordecai. Or, as Rabbi Pinchas Stolper put...
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Excerpt from Chanan Tigay’s ‘The Lost Book of Moses’
As the authenticity of his Moabite pottery collection came under withering attack, Moses Wilhelm Shapira fell into a depression that put his business and his family under strain. His reputation had...
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In Italy, a Unique Connection Between Women and the Torah
A Torah scroll takes years to finish, is written on a special parchment made of animal skin, by a select few who learn the craft, and is locked away, safely, in a special closet when it’s not in use....
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Fear of The Book, and My Path to Academe
Editor’s note: Every day this week, The Scroll will publish a memory relating to an experience in Jewish education, in honor of those wonderful kids in our lives who are heading back to school, back to...
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Chanting Torah Helped Me Connect With Long-Lost Ancestors
When I attended High Holiday services as a child, I was baffled by the menagerie of markings around the Hebrew words in the Chumash: dots, strokes, angles, diamonds, horns, wishbones. Our cantor...
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Gay Rights: Change Is Gonna Come. The Torah Says So.
Editor’s note: The following is adapted from a speech the author gave to one of the largest Conservative shuls in the U.S., where a significant number of congregants voted for Donald Trump. I would...
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Debunking Ben Shapiro's Delusional and Revolting Interpretations of 'Torah...
Ben Shapiro, a political pundit and Editor-in-chief of right-wing rag The Daily Wire, wowed the crowd at Yeshiva University with a vitriolic speech in which he decried the scourge of political...
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Daf Yomi: Who Wrote the Torah?
Literary critic Adam Kirsch is reading a page of Talmud a day, along with Jews around the world. Who wrote the Torah? The question arose in last week’s Daf Yomi reading, in a typically unexpected and...
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Ask Unorthodox: Vegan Torah?
Unorthodox, the world’s leading Jewish podcast, takes questions from its listeners about all aspects of Jewish life, from the religiously profound to the utterly inconsequential. Every week, we discuss...
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Parsha in Progress on the Story of Jacob and Esau
Dear Parsha in Progress fans: We hear you and are in the process of getting the show on iTunes and all the rest of the standard podcast sites. Thank you for your support! For the time being, enjoy...
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