March 21, 2023

PODCAST: The Hidden Order of Intimacy

TRADITION’s Winter 2021 issue featured Avivah Zornberg’s essay, “On Love, Holiness, and the Other,” which explored the “command to aspire” as an ethical imperative. That essay has now appeared as part of a larger chapter in her most recent book, “The Hidden Order of Intimacy: Reflections on the Book of Leviticus” (Schocken). As we commence our annual reading of Leviticus the TRADITION Podcast spoke with Zornberg about her new book, the intellectual “atmosphere” she breathes in order to produce works of Torah scholarship that bring together such wide-ranging voices, and the troubling state of the study of the humanities in the world today and within Jewish learning in particular. 
March 19, 2023

LETTER: The Interpretation of Dreams and Grain

Responding to Nava Finkelman’s recent essay, “Genesis Dream Pairs Revisited,” Ami Hordes points to the presence of the ambiguous word “shever” as a multi-valent hint to ideas that are lurking between the lines of the biblical Joseph story. Finkelman responds, adding deeper insight to the issues raised in her already compelling article.
March 16, 2023

Alt+SHIFT: Why Speak Hebrew?

What does the miraculous revival of Hebrew in the 20th century say about larger trends in Jewish life and nationhood? A new volume on Hebrew’s relationship to Jewish culture and scholarship, and the unlikely story of its reawakening, explores these questions from both historical and linguistic angles, and may make us question the implications of the state of Hebrew fluency among Anglo-Jewry today. Yitzchak Blau returns with a new installment of Alt+SHIFT.
March 13, 2023

The Rav’s Legacy

Proud of our historic association with the writings of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik zt”l, TRADITION hosted an online forum in cooperation with WebYeshiva.org on his 120th birthday, 12 Adar (March 5, 2023) – watch or listen to the archived audio and video recordings of those sessions. 
March 9, 2023

TRADITION QUESTIONS: The Man’s Seder

Does the rise of the Men's Seder suggest that Modern Orthodox men are lonely? Tzvi Sinensky answers yes, in this new TRADITIONS QUESTIONS column, arguing that alongside efforts to cultivate more entry points for women, Modern Orthodox communities must do more to meet our men's unique social and spiritual needs. 
March 6, 2023

Purim Archives

PURIM ARCHIVES: A freilichen Purim to TRADITION readers – Enjoy these Purim pieces from our archives…
March 2, 2023

TRADITION QUESTIONS: The “Jews In” Genre

Chaim Strauchler returns to TRADITION QUESTIONS by noting the disappearance of a once-popular literary genre that celebrates individual accomplishment through the lens of Jewish collective identity. He attributes this to the growth of “more than” anti-Semitism. He questions the absence of a parallel genre through which we might collectively take responsibility for the damage caused by our co-religionists.
February 27, 2023

The Search for God in Esther

God is conspicuously absent in Esther, though He is presumed to work “behind the scenes.” Nava Finkelman considers several other biblical narratives where a character attributes some outcome to God’s intervention, and, by analogy, suggests an overlooked hidden allusion to God in Esther as well. 
February 23, 2023

Alt+SHIFT: Avraham Stav’s Pop-Culture Criticism

R. Avraham Stav offers weekly insights and moral messages we can glean from all areas of popular culture. Yitzchak Blau, a self-professed skeptic about TV’s worth, along with other aspects of popular culture, admits that he finds Stav’s mining of television and movies to be rewarding—in this week’s Alt+SHIFT.