May 5, 2022
For Yom HaAtzmaut, TraditionOnline’s The BEST shares Rafi Eis’ application of John Locke’s “A Letter Concerning Toleration” to a dispute between Rabbis Sacks and Riskin concerning the separation of religion and state: When “religion enters politics, it becomes a divisive, not a uniting, force. If it seeks power, it will forfeit influence” vs. “Without power, how can the chosen people protect the powerless against their exploiters?”
April 28, 2022
As we mark Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) sample these relevant recent offerings from “The BEST” on Holocaust literature that engages our hearts, minds, and memories: Jeffrey Saks and Yitzchak Blau on Primo Levi; Shay Charka on Spiegelman’s “Maus.”
March 31, 2022
Yitzchak Blau writes on C.S. Lewis’ “An Experiment in Criticism” for The BEST: “Literature does provide pleasure, but it surely does more than that. It opens readers to new horizons, inspires them to analyze ideas, and connects them to a more profound sense of the good. If so, a poem must both be and mean.”
March 24, 2022
Chaim Strauchler on “The Idea of the Holy” for “The BEST”: Empiricism says things that cannot be measured do not really exist. Writing at the start of the 20th century, Rudolf Otto cried foul. There’s something within us (and beyond us) that cannot be reduced to external observation. This anti-reductionist approach is a critical weapon in a Ben or Bat-Torah’s arsenal today.