Teshuva means return, and return in the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish legal tradition means return to God. It is the word for repentance. Some prominent modern Jewish thinkers have used the term teshuva to refer to the individual or the community’s return to itself. The list . . . . Continue Reading »
Chanukah is Judaism at its least demanding and most comfortable. Continue Reading »
The Hanukkah candles glisten through the winter, signaling that we need to see beyond mere utility, to discover in others an inalienable dignity. Continue Reading »
It is not ethnic descent but union with Christ that determines one’s place in the household of God. Continue Reading »
Abraham is closest to God when, in Kierkegaard’s phrase, he goes “no farther than faith”—when he simply, merely, obeys the command. Continue Reading »
No one views Israel with indifference. As an old joke puts it, a philo-Semite is just an anti-Semite who likes Jews. Bari Weiss quotes this joke (to disparage Donald Trump) without grasping its deeper meaning. Anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism respond to the same thing, namely, God’s promise to the . . . . Continue Reading »
Until quite recently, natural law thinking had been a Catholic preserve. My interest in it was awakened during my days as a Jewish undergraduate at the University of Chicago, by the great Leo Strauss—himself a serious, though nonobservant, Jew. When I told Strauss of my interest in natural . . . . Continue Reading »
On the American “Jewish street” of the mid-1960s, you did not need to have read her work to have an opinion about Hannah Arendt. The German Jewish émigré to the United States had written a famous book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, which showed that anti-Semitism was at the core of the . . . . Continue Reading »
Germany must stake its national honor on the welfare of the Jewish people. Continue Reading »
The Jewish tradition plays a crucial role as the basis for Israel’s political mythology and identity. Continue Reading »
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