Articles

Ruth, Revisited For Shavuot: ten facts you might not know about the Book of Ruth, the biblical text dominated by women By Dudu Cohen

Who’s Afraid of Talmudic Women? In the lecture series “Not Only Bruriah,” Prof. Ruhama Weiss revisits Talmudic women pushed to the margins, uncovering the strategies each developed to survive a male-dominated world By BAC Staff

The Road to the Holy City For medieval pilgrims, Jerusalem was the center of the world – radiant, sacred, and longed for. What they actually found was something else. Dr. Eyal Davidson explores the travel diaries of the Holy Land By Alex Stein

God Takes the First Step For most Israelis, God is distant, tribal, and political. Abraham Joshua Heschel proposed something radically different: a God who genuinely cares about humanity – and who takes the first step toward it By Alex Stein

Parashat Behar: The Power of Seven Seven days, seven years, seven verses. Judaism’s obsession with the number seven reveals a brilliant insight into life’s natural rhythm. From work-life balance to shmita, exploring what it means to let go By Lior Tal Sadeh

The Shulchan Aruch of Jewish Ideas Most Jews have been holding it ever since childhood, but it doesn’t receive the attention it deserves. A fresh look at the siddur – and why it may be the most important Jewish text of all By Alex Stein

Neither Safe Nor Separate From the Civil War to October 7, American Jews have rarely been far from the fault lines of their country’s history. Historian Eli Lederhendler traces the moments of crisis that tested Jewish-American identity and finds that the tensions of today are older than they seem By Gilad Halpern

The Time to Take a Stand The past two years have taught Meydad Eliyahu that reality surpasses all imagination. In the exhibition “My Life at the Moment” he presents works born out of the war, and speaks about creating in real time, and about the possibility of translating images of reality into an artistic language By Noa Sorek

Parashat Emor: Commentary Revolutions How did the Sages transform “eye for eye” into the idea of monetary compensation despite the Torah’s clear language? Exploring the hermeneutical revolution: charitable interpretation, internal contradictions, and the radical claim that meaning is created, not discovered By Lior Tal Sadeh

The Objects You Cannot Touch Where did the concept of muktzeh come from, and why does moving a hammer on Shabbat matter so much? Dr. Yoel Kretzmer-Raziel traces the history of this overlooked part of Jewish law from the Bible to the Talmud By Alex Stein

Kedoshim and Acharei Mot Torah Portions: A Society of Deceit Exploring how the Torah’s plural language warns not only against personal wrongdoing, but against the normalization of dishonesty within the moral fabric of society By Lior Tal Sadeh

Not Only Hardship: Toil in the Declaration of Independence “Honest toil” is a short phrase from the Declaration of Independence that holds within it a great vision. Lior Tal Sadeh offers an important reminder for Independence Day By Lior Tal Sadeh

Between Revelation and Reason When modern scholarship began to treat the Bible as a document written by humans, Orthodox rabbis fought back – not by rejecting critical thinking, but by mastering it By Gilad Halpern

Parashat Tazria-Metzora: On Circumcision Circumcision creates a covenant in flesh, making a newborn baby part of an ancient story. Yet to a modern observer, this ritual raises difficult questions about tradition, autonomy, and what we owe our children By Lior Tal Sadeh

Wisdom of the Future Professor Yossi Turner believes three thousand years of Jewish texts hold hard-won answers about despair and recovery – answers we’ve largely stopped consulting, and urgently need now By Alex Stein