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Documents found in the Cairo Genizah provide powerful lessons about the importance of community, charity and compassion during earlier periods of Jewish experience. Historian Jennifer Grayson, Ph.D. investigates this treasure trove of Jewish life and practice. As a range of fascinating letters, records and receipts from the past show, Jewish communities have a long history of responding to communal and personal crises.
Jewish tradition offers a way of facing up to the scandal of human frailty and morality. COVID-19 has brought this reality into stark relief in recent months, and so the consciousness that there is no novelty in tragedy may provide a degree of comfort and perspective, even in trying times. Scholar of the Ancient Near East Kristine Henriksen Garroway, Ph.D. offers a way to reach across the centuries and find the most acute, the most contemporary human reality.
In this introduction to Scriptions, HUC-JIR's President Andrew Rehfeld, Ph.D., presents a defining question at a time of crisis. Does Reform Judaism, understood according to its broadest parameters, have a compelling vision equal to the drama and import of our current moment?
In liturgy, ancient formulae intersect with current yearnings. These months have seen an outpouring of Jewish liturgical creativity. An expert in both ancient and modern expressions of Jewish liturgy, Rabbi Dalia Marx, Ph.D. offers an initial reading of some prayers still hot off the press. Will these prayers and others created in this time find their way into the lexicon of Jewish devotion?
Considering the lessons learned during earlier traumas and the strategies employed by some of the prophetic voices that accompanied Ancient Israel through them, this careful study by Abraham J. Berkovitz, Ph.D., highlights three approaches for making meaning and providing purpose in our current time of crisis.
In this essay Adriane Leveen, Ph.D., includes both analysis of Biblical themes and an account of reading ancient texts with contemporary students, kept apart yet brought together. Considered on these two levels, prophetic voices from antiquity resonate with especial force.
Lauren Applebaum, Ed.D. and Sivan Zakai, Ph.D. reflect on this inflection point in the oldest of dynamics: that which links one generation to another, teachers to children. They ask: what challenges and what beauty might be found?
In a fascinating history of the response by Isaac Mayer Wise to a tragic series of Yellow Fever outbreaks in the 19th century, this article shows us how deeply and generously American Jews extended their care to those who became ill and were affected by earlier pandemics in American history. Tracing individual and communal responses to regional and national healthy crises, Rabbi Gary P. Zola, Ph.D., shows just how much we have inherited from the founder of institutional Reform Judaism in the U. S.
Doyen of scholars and inspiration to practitioners in the praying communities around and beyond the North American Jewish community, Rabbi Larry Hoffman, Ph.D., ventures into the area of theology. He argues that in this crisis time, the need for robust theological grappling has never been greater.
How to be passionate and moderate is a perennial challenge made more acute by the extreme circumstances of these days. Rabbi Michael Marmur, Ph.D., argues that in order to be equal to the enormity of the challenge, Reform Judaism will have to redouble its efforts to proceed with seriousness of purpose and resoluteness of spirit.
Well known in Israel as an author, poet, artist, teacher of rabbinic literature and public intellectual, Ruhama Weiss, Ph.D., offers a provocative and resonant reading of a Talmudic tale. Her interpretation connects the Sages of two millennia ago to the Pride Parade in contemporary Jerusalem, and many stops in between.
Rabbi Rachel Adler, Ph.D., is a theologian, striving to view profound questions of meaning through prisms of tradition. In this essay she turns to two psalms from the Hebrew Bible not included in liturgies of encouragement and comfort. She argues that Judaism in all its complexity offers articulations of deep anxiety, uncertainty and anger of which we may have need in these challenging times.
An acute observer of the American Jewish scene, Steven Windmueller, Ph.D., offers a clear-sighted analysis of our current situation. He suggests that American Judaism may be significantly impacted by ten defining elements of what yet may prove to be a pivotal moment.
In this exercise in Rabbinic Theology, noted scholar of the Talmud Alyssa M. Gray, J.D, Ph.D., presents a portrait of God as known to the Sages of the Talmud. In this period of uncertainty, the ancient quest seems more germane and more urgent than ever.
