TRADITION recently held its first Tradition Today Summit, addressing the issue of “Material Success and its Challenges.” Orthodox life in the United States has seen increasing material success in recent decades. This has had an impact in a wide range of areas – sumptuary trends, philanthropy, career choice, institutional sustainability (e.g., the tuition crisis), social and communal gaps between haves and have-nots, and more. While many of these topics have been discussed informally, little has been written about them in a systemic and organized fashion. Here is a summary of the proceedings, which we expect to publish in an upcoming issue of the journal.

Maimonides invokes passionate love between people as a key metaphor for the human relationship with the Divine, an idea widely explored by midrashic interpretations of Shir HaShirim which provokes questions about how love is nourished and how it functions. In reviewing Yakov Danishefsky’s “Attached: Connecting to Our Creator” (Mosaica), Sara Wolkenfeld evaluates the claim that the skills we develop in relating to the people around us, particularly our romantic partners, can help us craft a relationship with God.