Maimonides’ prooftext that man has power over his own actions is the biblical verse that describes the power man attained after sinning and eating from the forbidden Edenic fruit. Yet Maimonides also teaches us that as God wills that each part of creation exist in accord with its nature, He wills that man exist as a free rational agent. Furthermore, Maimonides emphasizes that the belief that man is given the power to do good or evil is fundamental to the Torah. Does it follow that God willed...

"One of the mountains that I will tell you", "the place that God will select", "the land of Moriah". These are some of the ways the Torah refers to the holiest city, never using the name it is widely known by. Join us this week as we discuss why these cryptic signifiers may be most appropriate for conveying Jerusalem's specialness. 

The Torah promises long life as the reward for the fulfillment of two commandments: honoring one's parents and sending away the mother bird before taking her brood. We are taught that the apparent failure of this promise to materialize for a boy who helped his father send away the mother bird powerfully impressed the great sage Elisha Ben Avuyah, leading him to become the notorious heretic Acher. This week's conversation attempts to unpack this challenging teaching, which is surprisingly...

Why did prophecy stop? Can we bring it back? If so, should we? Did it already come back in the year 1216? Is there a danger that witchcraft and idolatry may return as well?  Join us as we ponder these questions. We provide few conclusions, other than that this topic is of great importance, and not nearly as distant as one might think. 

"That some scoundrels from among you have gone and subverted the inhabitants of their town, saying, “Come let us worship other gods”—whom you have not experienced!" (Deuteronomy 13:14) "Let him who glories glory only in this, that he understands and experiences Me" (from Jeremiah 9:23) The Torah gravely warns of scoundrels who may tempt us to worship gods we don't experience. Jeremiah says there is nothing to be proud of except for genuine experience of God. Thus, much hinges on today's...

"He subjected you to the hardship of hunger and then fed you manna, which neither you nor your fathers had ever known, in order to make known to you that man does not live on bread alone, but that man may live on anything that the LORD decrees." (Deuteronomy 8:3) "The heavens ("Shamayim") belong to God, but the earth He gave over to man ." (Psalms 115:116) The Vilna Gaon teaches that the essence of Shamayim (the heavens) is that it is “Sham”, it is “there”. It is the ultimate not-here, and...

“Hear O Israel, the Lord who is our God will be One”. This is how Rashi, following the Sifri, interprets the first verse of the Shema, thereby understanding the statement as not a creed affirming a metaphysical truth, but rather as eschatology of the Future to Come. Until then, the "other gods" referred to in the second of the Ten Commandments roam the world. In this discussion, we attempt to unpack what this means and how the process we affirm in the Shema may unfold.

Moses, the man not-of-words, gives a wordy address that encompasses most of the fifth and final book of the Torah. Unlike the first four books of the Torah, Moses's speech expresses the prohibition against idolatry by repeatedly warning against serving gods that we "do not experience".  And close to the beginning of his speech, Moses utters the biblical expression of lamentation-"Eichah"- in stating his inability to lead Israel alone. Join us this week as we explore the connections between...

Balak and Balaam were among the first to attempt to curse the nation of Israel, and, in doing so, emphasized Israel's distinctness. Yet the attempted curses were turned into praises of Israel's uniqueness. Join us this week as we discuss this archetypal dynamic concerning Israel's relation to the nations, and its connection to today's antisemitism.

The prescribed purification process for contact with the dead is the paradigm of the mysterious class of torah laws called Chukim. The sages connect this process to Job's lamenting of man's mortality, and state that Job denied the resurrection of the dead. In perhaps our deepest and most wide-ranging discussion to date we posit that the essentially human tendency to view death as tragic paradoxically point to our eternal essence. Along the way we discuss the distinction between grass and...

Join us this week as we build on the idea of the "land that I will show you". We grapple with how the concept that land can be a conduit for man to see from a Godly perspective, takes on concrete form in a particular plot of land on planet Earth. We also explore what role the righteous people (particularly Abraham) contribute to this concretization, and why this particular strip of land in the Middle East that they saw Godliness in is still so central to this day. 

The land of Israel is described by God to Abraham as "the land that I will show you". Join us this week as we explore how this description gets to the very essence of what makes holy land holy. It is the land where inhabitants have the opportunity to see the way God sees, and to some extent, to see through His perspective.  To access the essays mentioned in this conversation, order the book Oros Yaakov at the following link: https://www.amazon.com/אורות-יעקב-Shnayor-Burton/dp/B0727TH8X8

" I make known Myself to him in a vision, I speak with him in a dream" (Numbers 12:6) "Know that the true reality and quiddity of prophecy consist its being an overflow overflowing from God, may He be cherished and honored, through the intermediation of the Active Intellect, toward the rational faculty in the first place and thereafter toward the imaginative faculty." (Guide of the Perplexed 2:36) Join us this week for an introductory discussion of prophecy (according to Maimonides), what...

After the sin of the golden calf the descendants of Aaron replaced the first-born representatives from each family in Israel, who were originally supposed to perform the  temple service. In other words, the selection of one family as the priestly class was not ideal. Join us as we explore the consequences of this replacement, how Israel can still be called “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation”, who will make up the priestly class in the third temple (may it be built speedily in our days)...

"One generation comes and another generation goes, but the earth stands forever",  says Koheleth, ascribing eternity to land and temporality to humans. Our connection to the land is repeatedly described in the Bible as one of both “alien" and "resident”, suggesting a paradoxical attitude towards land, where we are both transient and yet ensconced. Join us as we analyze this tension. We then look for true permanence by examining what a proper connection to our ancestral homeland would look...

In our prayers, which typically employ the phraseology of the Bible, we call the holiday of Shavuos the “day of the giving of our Torah”. Maimonides, who expounds on the reasons for the commandments according to their biblical parameters, teaches us...

The Holy Land spat out the Canaanites because of their incestuous and immoral practices, and we are warned that the same can happen to us if we emulate their abominations. What does sexual morality have to do with land? And for that matter, what do...

Time: a most ephemeral and elusive concept. We measure it day-by-day and ascribe significance to the individual days of our lives, but Psalms 90 suggests this may be an accident of our subjective and ungodly perspective, and one that we should strive to...

Many great theories have been posited to explain the Torah's Kosher laws, from the hygienic to the symbolic. But are the Kosher laws in truth a part of a larger story about humanity's connection to the animal kingdom? Join us as we begin in Eden, where...

Matzah, the bread of poverty,  symbolizes exiting Egypt, the land of the ever-flowing Nile river which the Torah likens to the "garden of God", and entering Israel, which relies on rainwater and "God's eyes are constantly upon". In this episode we...

God released us from the bondage of Egypt, only to place us under the burden of the yoke of His commandments. Did we truly attain the liberation that the Exodus had the potential to offer us, or are we still in a certain kind of slavery? Join Rav...

How do we make sense of the tension between Moses's and the Prophets' attitude toward the Temple service? Is human sacrifice warranted (in theory!)?  Is knowledge of God the ultimate religious value, or wholly inadequate compared to awe of the...