Tag: Bible
Solomon Schecter and the Cairo Genizah
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A windowless, doorless chamber, set high up into the wall of an antiquated synagogue and accessible only by ladder, is not normally the sort of place to which a traveller dreams of arriving. However, it was precisely such a room that Solomon Schechter, a Cambridge professor of Talmudic literature, was determined to reach when he…
Jordan Peterson’s journey to ‘We Who Wrestle with God’
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Book Review: We Who Wrestle With God (2024) Almost a decade ago, Jordan Peterson listened to his own “still, small voice” and decided to take a strong moral stand, come hell or high water. Peterson was then a relatively obscure professor at the University of Toronto, who also taught at Harvard. His fierce objection to…
Galilean museum showcases the Jesus Boat
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Originally appeared in The Toronto Star Yuval Lufan has the craggy face and rough hands of a fisherman who goes out onto the Sea of Galilee nightly with lanterns that attract the fish into his nets. Born on the shores of the lake about 50 years ago, he says he has dreamed since he was…
Secular Humanism: Jews without God (1999)
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From the Globe and Mail, November 1999 Rabbi Sherwin Wine of Birmingham Temple, Detroit, asserts that all of the patriarchs and prophets of ancient Israel are only myths — and so is the God of the Jewish people. Heretical utterances for a rabbi? Certainly, in any previous age. But today Rabbi Wine is the founder…
Elephantine Island: the Jews who returned to Egypt
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Eight centuries after Moses led the Children of Israel from Egypt, a Jewish community thrived on Elephantine Island, a small isle on the Nile in Southern Egypt near the present-day Aswan. Archaeologists date the origin of the Elephantine community to the dispersion and exile of the Jews from ancient Israel following the destruction of the…
Rabbi W. Gunther Plaut: An Appreciation
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From the Canadian Jewish News, 2017 From the moment in 1961 that he stepped into the role, Rabbi W. Gunther Plaut was always much more than rabbi of the esteemed historic Reform congregation, Holy Blossom Temple of Toronto. It was entirely Toronto’s gain and St. Paul Minnesota’s loss when Holy Blossom enticed Rabbi Plaut here,…
A visit to Jerusalem Archaeological Park
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From Canadian Jewish News, 2002 Below the southwestern corner of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, near the archaeological feature known as Robinson’s Arch, lies a random assortment of massive stone building blocks. Though you might not realize it at first, these blocks help bring history to life. They were once part of a parapet wall along the…
The Bible and modern cosmology in perfect harmony
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The Biblical account of the creation of the universe is in “complete and remarkable agreement” with the latest findings of modern cosmology, notes a leading Israeli physicist who has written a book on the subject. “At least regarding the first chapter of Genesis, the era of contradiction between Torah and science is over,” says Professor…
A visit to Zippori in Lower Galilee
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The Talmud says that the town of Zippori, in the Lower Galilee northwest of Nazareth, was so named “because it is perched on the top of a mountain like a bird [zippor].” Also perched on this picturesque mountain, roughly 1,800 years ago, was the Sanhedrin, the grand rabbinic-judicial council of ancient Israel, whose head, Rabbi…
