“In this volume I have attempted to convey my relationship with the Bible as ‘Torah,’ a book that in many ways is studied like all other books, but whose ultimate purpose is to guide and inspire, to be deeply affecting in the human search for a godly existence.”

As some people mistakenly think, Leibowitz’s loud call for the separation of religion and state in Israel was not an attempt to protect liberal values. Though Leibowitz was a liberal and did in fact hate seeing the rights of secular Israelis being trampled by religious oppression, his call to separate religion and state came from his attempt to protect religion itself.

We will seal the gates with attention, intention and the sacred letters. We're sealing from the center, not pushing the world away, rather just clarifying the boundary of the space that we're inhabiting. And we're going to move through the sixth directions above, below, east, west, south, north, each sealed with a permutation of the divine letters. 

The most extreme moment in American theater history came in the form of the 1849 Astor Place Riot in Manhattan, when at least 22 people died after a mob fought the New York police and the state militia. It was the manifestation of a battle represented by the feud between two British and American Shakespearean actors, William Charles MacReady and Edwin Forrest.

Our prophets viewed the release of slaves as a messianic promise, and our later texts such as the Talmud viewed slavery so harshly and their laws were aimed at the eventual abolishment of the practice.

It seems to me (and if I am wrong, I suspect I’ll be hearing about it) that the poems in Liner Notes are the text that goes with the actual music of Julia’s life. There is often a melancholy in her writing that comes with the inability to return to the unrecorded actual moment in life, and the compromise inherent in trying to play back the imperfect recordings of memory. The poems are the liner notes to those moments. Their intention is to try to fix and stabilize past moments with a meaning or just a fixed sensation that can be returned to.

Rebbe Nachman famously spoke and had his words written down in Yiddish, but most of his work, especially where interesting quotes come from, are in Hebrew. It of course would have been helpful to know what the sources of these quotes were, but I tried my best to look past that and imagine what these could sound like in a Modern Yiddish removed from Rebbe Nachman's time, but not removed from his vocabulary or his way of looking at things.

In her preface to the translation of this text, Ruth Wisse writes that literature about the underbelly of a culture typically arises as a “claim to greater honesty and a rejection of stilted fictional modes.”

Before breath is noticed, before movement takes shape, there is ruach—spirit, wind, life-force.

In the Gemara in Masechet Nidah, it is written that an infant is born knowing all the knowledge of the universe. But as soon as he or she emerges, an angel appears, and slaps the infant, who immediately forgets everything. (Some explain the ridge under our nose as the evidence of this). It is therefore a human being’s lifelong mission to discover and reveal that knowledge.

A library is not a collection of books. It is like a vast collage. The meaning is in the whole, but the parts are able to briefly stand for themselves when they catch our gaze. Our experience of those moments then reverberates in a particular reading that each viewer of the whole carries into their understanding of the whole. That whole, in the end, determines the correct reading of the image.

We are living in a very exciting time for Yiddish music because there are things people are creating that have either never happened before or haven’t happened in living memory.

Maimonides places a clear ethical value on learning and enlightenment: it is good to know the truth. This is the ethical assumption that seems to underlie all of the chapters. And yet, it is necessary that not everyone can receive the light in this way. Why is that? Maimonides also offers that when the truth is expressed, it can only be written “poetically or in riddles” (1.4b).

The verse begins, Three: water from breath. With it, God engraved and carved chaos and void, mire and clay. Breath condenses, movement gathers to become substance. What was dispersed begins to coalesce. What was formless begins to take shape. This is the work of Binah, the sefirah that is connected to water. It's not sudden creation, but patient gathering.

The Grimm Brothers’ project was not intended for the entertainment or education of children, as fairy tales are mostly used nowadays. Titled Kinder-und Hausmärchen (Children's and Household Tales), their first edition dating to 1812 had a different goal, a goal which is embedded in their plea. That goal was to rediscover German identity in the aftermath of Napoleonic conquest of Germanic lands, restore a common sense of German history and spirit and encourage German unification. 

This Thursday I represented the Jewish community at the annual Burial of the Unclaimed. I joined a group of other faith leaders, mostly Christian, but also Buddhist and Native American, providing a Jewish prayer and emphasizing that when we Jews remember our dead we commit to doing work to benefit those in need in this life. This year the ceremony laid to rest the cremated remains of 2,308 individuals in a (small) mass grave. It is painful to live in a place where so many people can be so completely forgotten in a year that there is no one to remember them.  

I deeply struggle with the idea that Yiddish cannot be revived and spoken as authentically and completely as it was once lived. To me, outside of my knowledge of linguistics or sociology, this is all about justice and goodness. Yiddish being reduced to a signifier is almost like a surrender to forces benign and evil.

ווי קען מען זיך אײַנבילדן אַן אָרט וואָס מען האָט קיינמאָל נישט געזען? אַן אָרט וואָס עקזיסטירט מער נישט–אַ וועלט וואָס הײַנט ליגטנאָר אין אונדזער כוח־הדמיון?

“Both liberty and equality are among the primary goals pursued by human beings throughout many centuries; but total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs, total liberty of the powerful, the gifted, is not compatible with the rights to a decent existence of the weak and the less gifted.”

Synagogue libraries were once a regular part of the Jewish landscape, but those days are mostly passed. Even very large synagogues like Sinai Temple, that once had a well-staffed library, one of the best, if not the best in the United States long since laid-off most of their staff and is now primarily there to serve the Akiva Day School. The Sinai Library has an online catalog which makes awareness of the collection accessible to the public even though the collection itself is not.