August 21, 2023

REVIEW: Attached: Connecting to Our Creator

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.
August 17, 2023

TRADITION QUESTIONS: Kissing a Torah App

Siddur apps prompt Chaim Strauchler to question how new technology affects our attachment to holiness in the physical world. We designate our siddurim as sifrei kodesh – holy books; we don’t do the same for our devices. Should we?
August 13, 2023

The Sea Change in American Orthodoxy

Twenty-five years ago TRADITION featured a major symposium issue, edited by Hillel Goldberg, asking 35 writers to respond to questions on Orthodoxy’s approach to other denominations, the internal relationships of various Orthodox sub-groups, and Orthodoxy’s greatest successes, failures, and threats. How does this snapshot of the Orthodox world a quarter century ago match up to our standards and concerns in the present? What did our writers get more right or less so? Download the whole issue as a special Digital Book.
August 10, 2023

Alt+SHIFT: Jewish Terror

With no moral equivalencies being made to Palestinian terror attacks against Jews, Roi Sharon’s journalistic book forces us to confront acts of Jewish terror aimed at Arabs. Yitzchak Blau’s Alt+SHIFT review focuses on the wild weeds in our own garden, a dangerous and evil growth that needs to be opposed and eradicated. While the overwhelming majority of the Religious Zionist world opposes this phenomenon, it is time to admit that we have a serious problem.