Isranet Daily Briefing
Wednesday, October 23rd 2024
DUALITIES OF JUDAISM Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah in a Nutshell: Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Rabbi Sacks Legacy — SHEMINI ATZERET is a strange day in the Jewish calendar. It is described as the eighth day, and thus part of Succot, but it is also designated by a name of its own, Atzeret. Is it, or is it […]
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Matti Wagner Times of Israel, Oct. 23, 2024 “This year, with so many men in reserve service, who will take the small children on their shoulders and dance with them?”” On the first anniversary of the most deadly attack on Jews since the Holocaust, rabbis of communities throughout Israel are grappling with how to […]
Doron Kornbluth Jerusalem Post, Oct. 22, 2024 “… simcha is related to who I am, who I can be, and who I am connected to.” I’ve always looked forward to Simchat Torah. This year? Not so much. You can guess why. The question is: How can we be happy this Simchat Torah? In a way, […]
Prof. James A. Diamond The Torah.com, Oct. 21, 2016 “Questions fuel all Jewish biblical interpretation.” “After [Abraham] was weaned, while still an infant, his mind began to reflect. By day and night, he was thinking and wondering, “How is it possible that this sphere should continuously be guiding the world and have no one […]
Shlomo M. Brody Tablet, Oct. 15, 2014 “Another distinctive element of Simhat Torah is that in addition to reading the day’s Torah portion and its maftir, we take out a third Torah scroll to begin the reading of Genesis.” Simchat Torah is an anomaly on the Jewish calendar. The festival, which celebrates the completion […]
Wednesday, October 16th 2024
Meir Y. Soloveichik Commentary Magazine, October 2023 “But that was not all that Yadin found. The cavern contained letters from Bar Kochba himself, including one written in advance of the Sukkot holiday, referencing the ritual of waving a lulav, a palm frond:” Striking archeological discoveries are a constant in Israel, but they can still occasionally inspire wonder. […]
Dovid Bashevkin Tablet, Sept. 1, 2021 “I don’t know why we long so for permanence,” writes the philosopher and physicist Alan Lightman, “why the fleeting nature of things so disturbs.” Most Jewish holidays are easy to explain to your non-Jewish colleagues. Many, if not most, know about Passover, and after enough years with enough Jewish […]
Scott Walker Washington Times, Oct. 10, 2024 “Over and over again, we will counter attempts to glorify terrorists and their evil deeds with the truth about the horrors of Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and all others who seek to harm Israel and Jewish people around the world. They continue trying to intimidate us, but we will not back […]
Tuesday, August 13th 2024
Canaan Lidor Times of Israel, Aug. 12, 2024 “Tisha B’Av invokes October 7 not because of the onslaught’s death toll — the highest of any massacre of Jews since the Holocaust — but because “our identity is now once again linked to pain, loss, and tragedy that makes Tisha B’Av one of deeper meaning, prayer, […]
Tuesday, August 13th 2024 / Tuesday, August 13th 2024
INCREASING TIES Podcast: J.J. Schacter on the First Tisha b’Av Since October 7: Tikvah podcast at Mosaic, Aug. 2, 2024 — On the 9th day of the Hebrew month of Av in the year 586 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar and his Babylonian forces destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem. Original Tisha B’Av Documentary: Heroism and Faith amid the […]
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks The Rabbi Sacks Legacy, July 28, 2014 “What the Torah tells us early on is how humanity failed. They did so in two ways. They created freedom without order. Or they created order without freedom. That is still the human tragedy.” Nine days from now Jewish communities around the world […]
Tanya White Times of Israel, Aug. 9, 2024 “The current war Israel is fighting has suffered from many failures, one of the greatest of which is the failure of the echelons of leadership to provide an effective narrative.” At the end of the hit musical “Hamilton,” there is a song whose lyrics continue […]
Prof. Rabbi Marty Lockshin The Torah.com, July 31, 2022 “ … at times, the voices in Lamentations interrupt each other within the same verse.[19] According to this Talmudic interpretation cited by Rashi, God would be the one interrupting here, but, as Greenstein writes, the one voice that is conspicuously absent from the book of Lamentations […]
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