What does it mean to leave everything behind? To reject the ideas a person grew up with, and commit instead to new ideals? Is it possible to maintain anything of the past when embarking on a new life? When we first meet Rivka, she seems basically perfect. Avraham has tasked his servant with finding the […]

Dear Jew in the City, I was told by a Jewish educator that my role as a wife is to defer to my husband because Chava came from a part of Adam and was supposed to be his helper. Is this actually based on Torah sources? -SG   Dear SG- In a sense, yes, it’s […]

Unlike a lot of women I’ve spoken to, I have always loved Simchas Torah. As a child, I loved it for the dancing and excitement. I loved my shul’s longstanding tradition of giving out candy apples to kids on Simchas Torah night; it was the only food with caramel and nuts that I ever liked. […]

This time of year, we love to talk about hate. We love to quote the Talmudic passage (Yoma 9b) that says the Second Temple was destroyed because of sinat chinam, usually translated as baseless hatred; we love to talk about increasing ahavat chinam, baseless love, to end the exile that hated began. And we love […]

Midrashic tradition tells us there are no coincidences, at least in the way the Torah tells its stories. When one verse (Numbers 20:1) says Miriam died and the next reports a lack of water – there is likely a connection between those events that goes deeper than simple chronology. The Talmud (Taanit 9a) explains that […]

In the merit of the righteous women who were in that generation, [the children of] Israel were redeemed from Egypt. (B. Talmud Sotah 11b) This midrashic statement gets a lot of press. Many people are intrigued by the idea that women played a central role in such a massively significant event as the exodus from […]