April 14, 2022
Published by Jeffrey Saks at April 14, 2022
As the TRADITION editorial office closes for Passover, we leave you with these highlights from our 64 years of archived essays. Enjoy this reading over Yom Tov – we hope all our readers will be celebrating a Hag Kasher veSameah in good health and in the company of loved ones.
April 13, 2022
Published by Tradition Online at April 13, 2022
When we left Egypt, we did not simply throw off the yoke of the Egyptians; we rethought our relationship with the species that “domesticated us,” suggests Chaim Strauchler. To commemorate that moment every year, we discard all the wheat (and the other four classic species of grain) that has not been prepared as matza. For the time span of seven or eight days, we declare our dominion over “our owner,” by controlling wheat consumption in a radical way.
April 12, 2022
Published by Jeffrey Saks at April 12, 2022
Erica Brown considers why R. Jonathan Sacks introduces his Haggada with an emphasis on the family as the heart of the Passover experience. “R. Sacks makes the case that the Seder, what he calls the oldest of Jewish rituals, takes place at home because Judaism attaches immense significance to the family.” Read the review essay and an excerpted chapter from “The Jonathan Sacks Haggada.”
April 11, 2022
Published by Tradition Online at April 11, 2022
The opening sections of the Haggada seem to lack the organizing structure that characterizes the Seder. At first glance, the opening anecdotes and stories are jarringly disjointed and chaotic. But Marc Herman shows that, upon closer analysis, the beginning of the Haggada can be read as a how-to manual for the fulfillment of the commandment to recount the Exodus from Egypt.
April 10, 2022
Published by Jeffrey Saks at April 10, 2022
The distinguished author Cynthia Ozick responds to Sarah Rindner Blum's recent essay "Living Antiquities: Ozick, Great Books & Judaism" (TraditionOnline) -- part of TraditionOnline'e ongoing series exploring the role of the classics in contemporary religious life.
April 7, 2022
Published by Jeffrey Saks at April 7, 2022
TRADITION's Spring 2022 issue has arrived -- making its way to subscribers' snailboxes now.
April 5, 2022
Published by Tradition Online at April 5, 2022
Simcha Fishbane’s new book sets out to understand how Hayei Adam went from being a widely popular halakhic work among laymen, although largely ignored by the rabbinic establishment of its day, to a paradoxical mirror status in our own. Gidon Rothstein reviews…
April 3, 2022
Published by Tradition Online at April 3, 2022
Surveying the mid-twentieth century American Jewish community from his pulpit, R. Norman Lamm mined the Passover story for two purposes – to make the case for royal humility, a constant vacillation between the confidence of freedom and the modesty of servitude, and as a call for a renewed and passionate Jewish observance. Stuart W. Halpern examines these themes as reflected in R. Lamm’s “The Royal Table.”
March 31, 2022
Published by Tradition Online at 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.”