Shalom Carmy

Rabbi Akiva taught that all the Bible’s songs are holy, and Song of Songs is the holy of holies. I have always understood this to mean that Song of Songs corresponds to the inner sanctum of the Temple in Jerusalem, where only the high priest entered on the Day of Atonement. Holiness is . . . . Continue Reading »

Covenant and Conversation: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible Volume One: Genesis by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks Maggid, 356 pages, $24.95 Jews recite the Torah, the five books of Moses, in an annual cycle, and they often identify a biblical passage by the week ( parasha ) in which it’s read . . . . Continue Reading »

In recent decades, the familiar list of seven deadly sins drawn up by the Church has become attractive to writers who wish to combine personal glimpses with sociological and moral insight; I think Henry Fairlie of The New Republic was the first modern journalist to try his hand at the genre. Why this rubric has become fashionable is a question in itself. Seven Deadly Sins: A Very Partial List is Aviad Kleinberg’s current entry… . Continue Reading »

Young Sam Johnson once balked when his father asked him to attend to his bookstall. “Pride was the source of that refusal, and the remembrance of it was painful,” he later recalled. On the fiftieth anniversary of the offense Johnson returned to the Uttoxeter-market and stood for an hour bareheaded in the pouring rain. What do you, modern Orthodox reader, make of this scene of remorse and expiation? … Continue Reading »

And from There You Shall Seek by Joseph Soloveitchik Ktav, 230 pages, $29.50 Near the end of Courage to Be , Paul Tillich writes: “God as a subject makes me into an object which is nothing more than an object. He deprives me of my subjectivity because he is all-powerful and all-knowing. I . . . . Continue Reading »

I Late August for my mother, in the last decade of her life, was a time of sadness. Inevitably the day would arrive when I could no longer put off telling her that next week the university would have “meetings.” She understood that preliminary meetings were a euphemism for the inescapable . . . . Continue Reading »

The Origins of Reasonable Doubt by James Q. Whitman Yale University Press, 288 pages, $40 The life of a culture is reflected by”and, in turn, reflects”its laws. The history of law, no less than ­political or intellectual history, is an essential ingredient of historical . . . . Continue Reading »

A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz Harcourt. 544 pp. $26 Just over forty years ago, a university literature student named Amos Oz summoned the courage to ring S.Y. Agnon’s doorbell. Upon hearing the young man’s name, the Nobel Prize“winning novelist asked: “Aren’t . . . . Continue Reading »

It has been forty years since my revered teacher Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, popularly known as “the Rav” by his followers in the modern wing of American Orthodoxy, presented his paper “Confrontation” to the Rabbinical Council of America. The paper was later published in the . . . . Continue Reading »

Jews are taught early that the atonement of Yom Kippur must be preceded by the effort to reconcile with persons one has hurt, and that it is forbidden to be callous when approached for forgiveness. September afternoons in the schoolyards of my youth were filled with the merry voices of children . . . . Continue Reading »