High Holiday Companion
TABLE OF CONTENTS
by Rabbi Simcha Zissel Ziv and Geoffrey Claussen
In the 1860s, Rabbi Simcha Zissel Ziv tried to found a new kind of yeshiva in which students would devote significant time to thinking about their moral lives.
by Allan Nadler
Old World Ashkenazi cantorial art—khazones—is making a comeback, with a surprising little boost from a Leonard Cohen single (yes, that Leonard Cohen).
In this season of repentance, it is not only the laws of the rabbis, but their stories as well, that teach us how—and how not—to forgive.
And should we add a confession on Yom Kippur “for the sin of opening browser windows of distraction”? On Aristotle’s akrasia and Maimonides’s teshuvah.
by Noah Millman
How Shakespeare helps us think about the akedah, and vice versa.
by Shari Saiman
The reimagining of an ancient architectural ritual.
by Jacob ben Isaac Ashkenazi & Morris M. Faierstein
There was once a custom for a pregnant woman to bite off the tip of the etrog at the end of Sukkot. This excerpt includes the text of a Yiddish prayer, or tkhine, that the pregnant woman is instructed to recite based on an interpretation of Genesis 3:6.
The tradition to stay up all night studying on Shavuot is far more well known than the tradition to do so on Hoshana Rabbah. Neither would have been possible without Kabbalah and caffeine.
by Adam Kirsch
The scroll, which was originally a secular technology, became closely associated with Judaism at a time when Christians were adopting the codex for their holy books.
The Torah reading cycle provides the structure not just for the Jewish year but also for countless volumes of commentary on the biblical text.
Suggested Reading
Torah and the Thermodynamics of Life: An Interview with Jeremy England
Hailed by some as the next Darwin, immortalized as a character in a Dan Brown novel, Jeremy England discusses religion and science, his background, and his intellectual influences.
Are We All Protestants Now?
Leora Batnitzky's new book charts the development of modern Jewish thought.
Chaim Grade: A Testimony
Toward the end of his life, the talmudist Saul Lieberman published his only Yiddish essay, an appreciation for his friend, the novelist Chaim Grade, the great witness to a lost world. Translated and with an introduction by Allan Nadler.
Friendship?
Margot takes in the whats and wherefores of Judaism but is never quite able to grasp the why: why someone would wish to be Modern Orthodox and live a life according to the strictures of traditional Jewish law.
