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On Saturday night as Jews initiated the penitential Selichot cycle of prayers leading up to Rosh Hashanah, someone was outside two of the Orthodox synagogues in Seattle’s Seward Park neighborhood, spray-painting swastikas, the word “Nazi,” and “Fourth Riech” (misspelled) on the doors and sidewalks outside. Of course everyone’s very upset here, understandably so, but my…

Anyone who has spent time in the pages of the Talmud and other rabbinic literature will know the distinction between halachah and aggadah — law and story. The nature of Jewish law, while being everywhere tortuously argued, is assumed otherwise to be straightforward. In the Talmud, a discussion of halachah seeks to define the path…

If you think of yourself as anything like a thoughtful person — I can’t use the word “intellectual” without cringing — it’s not generally held to be in good taste to say you’re keenly awaiting the debut of Dan Brown’s latest, The Lost Symbol, on Tuesday. Yet I admit I put in my Amazon order…

I’ve often thought the controversy around capital punishment, with life imprisonment as the proposed alternative, has things backward. It’s not the former that should be controversial but the latter. The sickening Phillip Garrido/Jaycee Dugard story — of child kidnapping, imprisonment, rape — recalls an item of Torah wisdom about prison itself. Rav Hirsch reflects, “Punishments…
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