Tradition Podcast

Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg is an internationally recognized teacher and lecturer around the English-speaking world and, each week, in multiple settings in Jerusalem, where her unique style of integrating keen readings of the weekly Torah portion with the commentaries of midrash, classical meforshim, Hasidic interpretation, and more, are supplemented by the insights she draws from philosophy, psychoanalytical readings, literature, and culture at large – the “best that’s been thought and said,” as it were. Her work has inspired generations of students, and has produced a very rich body of six volumes on biblical books and themes. 

TRADITION’s Winter 2021 issue featured her essay “On Love, Holiness, and the Other,” and, channeling the work of psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear and R. Aharon Lichtenstein, explored the “command to aspire” as an ethical imperative. That essay has now appeared as part of a larger chapter in her most recent book, The Hidden Order of Intimacy: Reflections on the Book of Leviticus (Schocken).

As the Jewish world commences our annual reading of Leviticus this week the TRADITION Podcast spoke with Zornberg about her new book, the unusual way it came about, and the intellectual “atmosphere” she breathes in order to produce works of Torah scholarship that bring together such wide-ranging voices. We also discussed the troubling state of the study of the humanities in the world today and within Jewish learning in particular. The host for this episode is Jeffrey Saks, editor of TRADITION.

Watch a video recording of this conversation.

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Dr. Tovah Lichtenstein and R. Jeffrey Saks in conversation to mark the 120th birthday of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik zt”l. Hosted by TRADITION and WebYeshiva.org (12 Adar/March 5, 2023).

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Prof. Marc B. Shapiro’s recent essay “From the Pages of TRADITION: R. Esriel Hildesheimer on Torah Study for Women” (TRADITION, Summer 2022), was the subject of our most recent podcast. Shapiro joined Jeffrey Saks to discuss Hildesheimer’s legacy and that of 19th-century German Orthodoxy; the history of women’s Torah study; trends in Jewish education; and the intersections of Jewish history and thought.

Marc B. Shapiro holds the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Chair in Judaic Studies at the University of Scranton. He is the author of, most recently, Changing the Immutable: How Orthodox Judaism Rewrites Its History (The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization), among many other scholarly works.

Watch a video recording of this conversation.

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In the 1970s Moral Philosophy turned its attention to an ancient topic – but coined a new name to organize our thinking about it. That field, now known as “Moral Luck” constitutes a set of fascinating and important philosophical debates. Do we judge people by their intentions, for good or for ill, or by the results of those intentions? This has serious implications for both ethics and jurisprudence, and in civil society as well as within our own religious Tradition.

Rabbi Dr. Michael J. Harris recently published “Resultant Moral Luck and Jewish Tradition” (TRADITION, Fall 2022), examining the many significant sources within rabbinic literature that can be brought to bear on this discussion. Harris is Senior Rabbi of the Hampstead Synagogue and Senior Research Fellow at the London School of Jewish Studies. The conversation delved into his essay and the philosophical, halakhic, and aggadic literature surrounding “Moral Luck,” but also discussed how he navigates his role as both community rabbi and academic scholar, as well as the state of philosophical inquiry and the liberal arts within contemporary Modern Orthodoxy.

Watch a video recording of this conversation: https://youtu.be/J36ms8qPhy4

Read “Resultant Moral Luck and Jewish Tradition”: https://traditiononline.org/resultant-moral-luck-and-jewish-tradition/

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TRADITION’s Summer 2022 issue featured an article by Yakov Nagen, “Sharing Torah with the World: The Jewish People’s Responsibility to Non-Jews.” The essay was part of a cluster of content related to topics in Jewish Universalism. 

Nagen’s contribution is a learned treatment of issues related to the challenge of being a “light unto the nations” in which he argues that teaching Torah to non-Jews is the most effective way to fulfill our Jewish spiritual mission. His is a provocative thesis, since it must account for longstanding contrary attitudes and approaches, and must justify the endeavor in the face of readings of tradition and halakha which (at best) looks at such activity with suspicion, or (at worst) outright forbids it. Nagen takes this all on in his essay – available open-access to our readers. 

Rabbi Dr. Yakov Nagen is the director of Ohr Torah Stone’s Beit Midrash for Judaism and Humanity and Blickle Institute for Interfaith Dialogue. He is also a long-time senior rabbi (Ram) at the Otniel Yeshiva.

Watch a video recording of this conversation.

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As our readers and listeners likely know, since the launch of the TraditionOnline website in the summer of 2019 we have published a weekly feature called “The BEST.” In that column we have asked a wide variety of writers to consider what things “out there” in the big wide world make them think and feel. What elements in general culture potentially inspire us to live better? We have sought to share these insights on cultural objects – both high and low – that might still be described as “the best that has been thought and said,” in Matthew Arnold’s phrase. We considered the types of art, literature, film, you name it, that can serve as an antidote to the anarchy of materialism, industrialism, individualistic self-interest, and worst elements of modernity.

So far, The BEST has produced almost 150 entries on everything from Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare; Jane Austen and Emily Dickenson; John Locke and John Stuart Mill; the speeches of Lincoln and Dr. King… and reaching all the way over to the music of Johnny Cash and Joni Mitchell; Star Trek and Star Wars; and even took up “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” The full archive of these essays and so much more can be found at www.traditiononline.org/thebest

However, we inform our listeners, The BEST will be going on recess for a period. It will return in the future, but keep your eyes on our website for news of the exciting feature which will be filling in for a number of months starting after the holidays. Before The BEST takes its break we wanted to do a bit of a retrospective. In this conversation, Marina Zilbergerts, Dov Lerner, and Chaim Strauchler discuss the challenges and opportunities of harnessing worldly culture in the service of religious life. They also consider questions of instrumentalism, the decline of the liberal arts, and the recent “New York Times” expose on Hasidic yeshivot.

Marina Zilbergerts is a scholar of Jewish literature and thought and the author of The Yeshiva and the Rise of Modern Hebrew Literature.

Dov Lerner serves as the Rabbi of the Young Israel of Jamaica Estates and a member of the faculty at Yeshiva University’s Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought.

Chaim Strauchler is the rabbi of Cong. Rinat Yisrael in Teaneck, and is an associate editor at TRADITION, where he shepherds The Best column, and has provided us all with so much thoughtful and thought-provoking content.

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With Rosh Hashana around the corner, and the end of the Shemitta year upon us, TRADITION’s editor Jeffrey Saks sat down chat with Shlomo Brody about his recent essay “The Curious Case of Prozbul’s Disappearance and Resurgence” (open access at https://traditiononline.org/the-curious-case-of-prozbuls-disappearance-and-resurgence).

Brody’s essay offers a fascinating tour of an episode in the history of halakha: how the rabbinically enacted prozbul document, which helps circumvent the loan forgiveness imposed every seven years at the end of the Shemitta cycle, came about, then fell out of use, and subsequently resurged – taking on new force and meaning in recent Jewish history. This test-case raises interesting questions about how and if halakha adapts and evolves. 

Rabbi Dr. Shlomo Brody was recently appointed the Executive Director of the Halakhic Organ Donor Society.   

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This is an Audio Editor’s Note from TRADITION’s newly released Summer 2022 issue—Rabbi Jeffrey Saks reads his essay “It Takes a Cosmic Village” which introduces a special section on Jewish Universalism.

In this column our editor muses on a cluster of essays recently published in our pages, situating them at the intersection of Jewish Universalism and Particularism; or, in Rabbi Soloveitchik’s terms, between the “majestic cosmic sphere” and the humble “here-minded.” Saks considers how these themes are of particular import at this moment of political ferment within society at large and within our own religious community – between the polis and the “shtetl.”

Click here to read the print version of the column.

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The late and lamented Rabbi Jonathan Sacks was a frequent critic of the emergence of a post-truth culture and also a life-long opponent of moral relativism. Yet, in his book, “The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations,” he was an ardent proponent of a form of religious pluralism. When first published over 20 years ago his position was both attacked and misunderstood—giving rise to questions about how his Orthodoxy and his devotion to objective truth were able to sit alongside his advocacy for a form of religious pluralism. 

Samuel Lebens explored these questions in an essay for TRADITION’s Spring 2022 issue titled “One God, One Truth, Many Languages: Rabbi Sacks’ Pluralism Reexamined” (open access here: https://traditiononline.org/one-god-one-truth-many-languages-rabbi-sacks-pluralism-reexamined). 

In this podcast, Dr. Erica Brown, a consulting editor at TRADITION, talks to Lebens about these topics in Rabbi Sacks’ thought and about his recent essay.

Rabbi Samuel Lebens is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Haifa, and the author of, most recently, “The Principles of Judaism“ (Oxford University Press), which investigates the axioms of Jewish faith through the lens of contemporary analytic philosophy, and the forthcoming “Philosophy of Religion: The Basics” (Routeledge). Dr. Erica Brown serves as the Vice Provost and Inaugural Director of Sacks-Herenstein Center for Values and Leadership at Yeshiva University.

Watch a video recording of this conversation at YouTube: https://youtu.be/yANV446q6jk 

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