There is a story told about the birth of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of the Chassidic movement. His parents, Reb Eliezer and Sara, were known far and wide for their generous hospitality. Elijah the Prophet was once sent to their home to test their sincerity. One Shabbos afternoon, Eliyahu banged on their door carrying a staff in his hand and a knapsack on his back thereby clearly desecrating the Shabbos. Reb Eliezer opened the door and warmly greeted his guest.  Although Reb Eliezer understood that the beggar had violated Shabbos, he pretended not to notice. Reb Eliezer told his guest ..read more

Here is the third response to my last week’s interview with Rabbi Aryeh Klapper about his new book Divine Will and Human Experience   The first response was by Rabbi Yitzchak Roness- here. The second one here is by Rabbi Ysoscher Katz-here This one is by Rabbi Johnny Solomon who teaches Halacha and Jewish Thought at Matan and Midreshet Lindenbaum, and he works as #theVirtualRabbi – offering online spiritual coaching, halachic consultations, and Torah study sessions to men, women, and couples around the world. DIVINE WILL and HUMAN EXPERIENCE:  Review by Rabbi Johnny S ..read more

What is the Hindu view of God from a Jewish perspective? Social media is filled with those who speak with minimum knowledge of modern Hinduism. They might have once read a survey book on world religions that described the Vedic religion of ancient India 3000BCE and 200BCE and considered that minuscule amount of information about an ancient civilization as enough to address a modern religion.  And they certainly do not consider how much that textbook reflects Protestant or Orientalist perspectives that make ritual less Protestantism as the pinnacle of religion. I will state clearly and una ..read more

Is the Lurianic concept of God’s contraction (tzimzum) a metaphor or to be taken literally? The thinker who formulated the approach that treats it as a metaphor and that the divine still fills all space was Rabbi Joseph Ergas (1685–1730), an Italian rabbi, kabbalist, and halakhist. Ergas wrote a short 57 double-sided page book called Shomer Emunim which is a basic defense and introduction to Lurianic Kabbalah. Avinoam Fraenkel did the English-speaking world a service by translating the work in a new volume, which spun the original 100 pages, as flax into thread, into an 1100-page work. The vol ..read more

The blog will return after a hiatus of the better portion of a year. Look forward in the coming weeks to my own essays and to interviews with various visiting authors. I was busy with new administrative activities as director of graduate studies. I was busy preparing for my month-long return to India and I was busy with having to prepare asynchronous online classes. But now I am back. Blogging, for me, is a sign that I am writing. In fact, I have a two contract deal from Fortress Press for two books (1) One on a Jewish theology of religious diversity, and (2) one on a Jewish Theology of the Tr ..read more

Still here since 2009 After all the years, still posting If you like a given post then please repost it to social media or send it to friends ..read more

“Everything depends on mazal, even the Torah Scroll in the Ark” (Zohar 3, 134a). Rabbi Professor Abraham Joshua Heschel’s great work Torah Min Hashamayim B’aspaklaria Shel Hadorot – Torah from Heaven in the Reflection of the Generations suffered from a lack of mazal. Only the first two volumes of the three-volume set were published. The third volume, however, appeared only in fragmentary forms and even then, with incomplete editing.  We must thank Dror Bondi, Heschel’s Hebrew translator, for publishing as complete a text of the third volume as possible. Bondi did amazing work by ..read more

The paperback edition of my book Rabbi on the Ganges: A Jewish-Hindu Encounter (Lexington Books) came out two weeks ago. Now is the time to buy it for yourself or as a gift. It will interest all those who want to know about the Jewish-Hindu Encounter including the Hin-Jews, Bu-Jews, and the Jewish Yoga practitioners that you know in your life. You can read it over the holidays. Or buy it now and bring it with you when you plan on hiking in India. Rabbi on the Ganges: A Jewish-Hindu Encounter as described by Rabbi Yakov Nagen, Otniel Yeshiva Rabbi, professor, traveler, storyteller, spiritual s ..read more

Mitnagged Spirituality may sound incongruous to many, may be even an oxymoron. Modern American Jewish studies focuses almost predominantly on Hasidut and Neo-Hasidut, but strikingly less so on Lithuanian Jewish spirituality.  However, there have been over 25 years of conferences on the thought of the Vilna Gaon and his followers, mainly at Bar Ilan University. Little of this material has become integrated into English language studies of modernity. Over the course of the last generation the writings of the circle of the Vilna Gaon and his students have been explicated by Idel, Etkes, Lieb ..read more

The themes of Existentialism are well known in Western society at this point. These include lived experience, anxiety, choice, authenticity, being-unto-death, temporality, and mindfulness. But at one point, they were not the language of pop-psych books and shallow clergy sermons. They were the serious turn of 1920’s modern philosophy away from the rationality and grand scale questions towards asking the basic phenomenology of our lives and how we are finite fallible being faced with our own deaths. The leading figure in this turn to the human condition was Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), who sta ..read more