High Holidays
Apart from Kol Nidrei, no High Holy Day prayer is better known than Un’taneh Tokef. But there’s a puzzle at its heart.
God’s first creative proclamation was “Let there be light,” so it might seem that the day came first. But then why does the Bible say that “it was evening and it was morning?”
On the overuse of ḥag same’aḥ and the redundancy of gut yuntif.
This week, we dig through the archives to bring you excerpts from our best conversations on faith, mortality, tradition, obligation, and sin.
The product of a millennium of tension between law and folk tradition.
Being someone before God.
To avoid that fate, rabbis and synagogues might begin by acknowledging where and how Judaism differs, and proceed from there.
Synagogues may no longer be stuffy and hidebound, but contemporary changes utterly transform for the worse the powerful experience of the Days of Awe.
Today’s liberal Judaism may or may not have struck the right balance between tradition and change; but that’s a conversation worth having.
Unless they feel personally welcome, non-traditional Jews won’t care to own anything at all of the tradition.
From a naïve confidence to an enduring hopefulness.
At least one of them might stem from the days when Jews ululated.
What happens when, once a year, the urge to accommodate every consumer fashion meets massive Jewish cultural illiteracy?
The month of Elul.