Parashat Ha Shavua Commentaries

One of the striking facts about religious faith around the world is the array of ways in which human beings conceive of, and worship, the Divine. The sacred claims a myriad of names -- Ahura Mazda, Brahma, Nirvana, Takan Wanka, Osiris, Zeus, Jupiter, Wodan, and many, many more. Given how many names the Divine is called, it is particularly striking that the Jewish conception of God doesn't really have a name at all. Or, at the very least, our God's name is suspiciously like no name.   Read more...

Every school child is familiar with the story of Noah and the Flood. God tired of the cruelty and immorality of humankind and vowed to destroy the entire species through a spectacular deluge. But God selected one righteous family, that of Noah, and saved them by instructing them to build an ark. Noah did so and saved himself, his family and representatives of all the different types of animals and birds. Read more...

It is a fact of history that all of the Rabbis of the Talmudic age were men. Actually, every Rabbi -- from antiquity to modernity -- were men until 1972, when the first woman was ordained. Similarly, in other religious and secular traditions, the male perspective has dominated almost exclusively -- to the extent that "man" was a term used to mean humanity and the pronoun "he" was considered gender-neutral.   Read more...

Simchat Torah celebrates God’s gift of Torah to the Jewish people, and our age-old love affair with the Torah. As we swirl and dance with these precious scrolls, now may be a particularly appropriate time to consider what the Torah really means, and how it connects our lives to God’s will. In short, let’s take a moment to consider how we relate to God and how God relates to us.   Read more...

A few weeks ago I received a package in the mail from Professor Thomas Ord, a Christian theologian who teaches at Northwest Nazarene University in Idaho. He mailed me two of his latest books because he read an article of mine and he thought they would help us launch a conversation. The two books offer an extended argument that the central virtue of Christianity ought to be love - not faith, not salvation, but love. Read more...