Articles

The Gift of the Gay Rights Debate

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We grow as religious people through an unlikely combination of courage and humility. It takes courage to question one’s opinions, and humility to recognize that we may not be as right as we thought. It is for this reason that spiritual progressives have rightly embraced the movement for equality for LGBT people not as a condundrum, but as an opportunity for precisely the kind of spiritual maturation we seek.

2011

Sword and Plowshare in Jewish Thought

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Eisen’s book is written as a series of dialogues between two voices: one that believes Judaism accepts and affirms the use of violence, and one that believes Judaism much more strongly seeks and urges peace. This pattern is useful but could be a lot more useful, were it not for two baffling failings in this review of the multimillennial literature.

2011

From the Beginning of Time to the End of Days

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The Tree of Life is a brilliant achievement in almost all respects, bringing the eternal and the everyday, the macrocosmic and the microscopic, and the physical and the metaphysical into graceful convergences that are awesome to behold.

2011

The Legacy of Abraham Joshua Heschel

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Abraham Joshua Heschel was a singular figure in American Jewish history and, indeed, in Jewish thought. Nearly four decades after his death—his legacy remains towering and majestic in the consciousness of the American Jewish community and beyond. How fortunate, then, that Susannah Heschel has given us a new edited collection, Abraham Joshua Heschel: Essential Writings. Not only does this remarkable collection provide a sense of the breadth of Heschel’s interests and writings, but the ordering of the selections and the insightful introductions highlight the deep coherence of the different dimensions of his work.

2011

Circumcision: Identity, Gender, and Power

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Circumcision is seen as the central mitzvah (or commandment) of Judaism. Even for nonreligious Jews, circumcision continues to be perceived as the sine qua non of Jewish identity. And yet, unlike any other controversial topic that we Jews address, the subject of circumcision is not to be challenged. What I intend to do here is to show that cutting out a portion of a child’s genitalia is fundamentally about gender and power.

Articles

Your Inheritance

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Rabbi Artson argues here that “The universe, if left to its own devices, will produce goodness, righteousness, decency, all by itself.” That this is true, despite everything we do to the contrary, is an encouragement to us to fight social evil, to give thanks to all who came before us and to feel at one with all people.

Rethinking_Religion

VIDEO: Sheikh Hamza Yusuf

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Sheikh Hamza Yusuf, co-founder of Zaytuna College in Berkeley, calls on religious people of all faiths to face head-on the “negative externalities of religion” — those toxic side effects of religion that we don’t like to deal with. In an age of nuclear proliferation, he explains, religious extremists of all faiths — not to mention the fundamentalist secularism of people like Sam Harris, who calls for a pre-emptive strike on Muslims — are capable of destroying massive numbers of people. The way out of this mess, Yusuf says, is for Jews to emulate the Judaism of Rabbi Hillel, Muslims to practice the Islam of Imam Al Hasadi and Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, and Christians to draw inspiration from Francis Assisi. Hamza Yusuf gave this speech after accepting the Tikkun Award at Tikkun’s Twenty-Fifth Anniversary celebration. [youtube: video=”r0IMzz7p6Mk”]

2011

Truth

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When I began living as a woman, my children’s world split open. As the truth of my gender collided with the truth of their pain at losing the man they loved, it seemed there was no world we could inhabit together — until love taught us that no matter what gender I expressed, I would always be their father.