Most of our religious observances are indoors--in our homes, in our synagogues. We generally do not like to create a public spectacle of our religious experiences, but we behave modestly and try not to call attention to ourselves as we perform mitzvoth. There are some exceptions to this. On Hanukkah, it is a particular mitzvah to publicize the miracle by placing our hanukkiyot where they can be seen by the passers-by. Sukkoth also has some aspects of taking our religious obse

Books on the Jewish view of death and afterlife tend to arrive in one of two registers: pastoral comfort or academic survey. Rabbi Michael Beyo's Choose Life belongs to neither. It is an argument — sustained, sharply constructed, and unfashionably confident — that the Torah's command in Deuteronomy 30:19, uvacharta bachayim, "choose life," is not a platitude but the organizing principle of an entire civilization's four-thousand-year dissent from the rest of human history. Bey

Rabbi Yehuda Alkalai z"L As we experienced the awesome day of Yom HaKippurim, we find ourselves living through a moment in which the very idea of Jewish national return has become the subject of intense debate. Antisemitism and anti-Zionism are increasingly intertwined in the public discourse, while Jews themselves are once again asking fundamental questions about Jewish identity, peoplehood, sovereignty, and the meaning of the Land of Israel. At such a moment, understanding

An artistic rendering of Don Isaac Abravanel August 1492. An armada of sorts anchors in the port of Naples. Nine Spanish caravels of the same class that will soon carry Columbus to the New World. However, these ships are laden with adventurers of another kind: a thousand Sephardic refugees, packed up like sardines in a can. A sympathetic onlooker watches them disembark. “They were like wraiths,” he will recall. “resembling corpses in all but the power of motion.”[1] Their I

The Passover Haggadah presents a dramatic format for dealing with questions relating to religious observance. It presents four children, representing different attitudes toward Jewish belief and ritual, along with the framework for how to answer each of the questioners. The "rasha" (wicked child) is antagonistic to Jewish tradition. He/she does not feel part of it, and asks: what's the point of all this ritual? Why do you do these things? The Haggadah realizes that there is l

Elias Canetti, a Sephardic Jew who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981, offers some interesting observations about Jews in his...

Early in the Agada, we read of the gathering in B’nei B’rak of Rabbi Eliezer, Rabbi Yehoshua, Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah, Rabbi Akiva and...

An artistic rendering of Don Isaac Abravanel Don Isaac Abravanel (b. 1437; d. 1508) is remembered as a great rabbi and commentator among...

Rabbi Ben-Zion Meir Hai Uziel, the first Sephardic Chief Rabbi of the State of Israel, learning with young students in Jerusalem A quick...

Rabbi Dr. David de Sola Pool z"L Rabbi Dr. David de Sola Pool was the pre-eminent Sephardic Rabbi in America during the mid-twentieth...