Theology

In the Bible, God’s appearance is a blessing, while God’s hidden face is a punishment. But does that mean we've been punished for millennia? Chasidic masters offer a profound reinterpretation: God’s absence is a divine invitation—calling those who are willing to seek God out, to forge a deeper connection.

With its sensitively portrayed characters and quotidian contexts, the story of Ruth and Naomi underscores questions about the good path in life, the choices we make, and especially the role of the deity who controls all. The narrative also touches upon a wide array of issues concerning gender, economic deprivation, the status of the migrant, and other matters.

Who needs the Tabernacle? What is the purpose of sacrifices? Maimonides and Nahmanides have radically different answers to these questions, reflecting a core debate about the nature of Judaism and the purpose of its rituals.

Atop the kappōret, the ark’s cover, sat the golden cherubim, which framed the empty space (tokh) where God would speak with Moses. Drawing on the connection between the word kappōret and the root כ.פ.ר (“atone”), and noting how the golden calf episode interrupts the Tabernacle account, the rabbis suggest that the ark cover served as a means of atoning for the Israelites’ collective sin.

The reading of Lamentations on Tisha b’Av functions both as the climax of the three weeks of mourning and the beginning of the seven weeks of conciliation, which leads us into the High Holidays.

2 Maccabees tells the story of a mother whose seven sons are killed before her eyes because they refuse to violate Jewish mores. The mother recalls the woman of seven sons and her bereft counterpart found in Hannah’s prayer (1 Samuel 2), and perhaps also the mother in Jerusalem described in Jeremiah 15, but offers a new theological twist on Jewish suffering: the promise of resurrection.

What do the terms “holocaust” and “shoah” mean, and what do they reveal about how we view the respective roles of God and the Nazis in the Jewish genocide?

What is the gender of the God of creation? Of YHWH in general?

The Priestly Torah discusses the Tabernacle at extraordinary length, emphasizing its portability. Nothing in P ever says this structure was meant to be temporary. P’s Tabernacle was not foreshadowing the Temple, but was a polemic against Haggai and Zechariah’s agitation to build the Second Temple.

Leviticus 16 – ויקרא טז

It seems unethical for God to deny Pharaoh free will and then punish him for his actions. Rashi, Nahmanides, and Maimonides all struggle with this problem, and each assumes that even Pharaoh deserves to be treated fairly.

Ezekiel challenges the divine (in)justice of intergenerational punishment, even though it appears in the Decalogue.

Does Abraham really need to be historical in order to claim an important role in Jewish religious consciousness? Should the Torah be seen as a historical account reported by God, or simply as the story of God?

As part of the selichot prayer service, the rabbis cut the biblical phrase וְנַקֵּה לֹא יְנַקֶּה “[YHWH] does not remit punishment” to read only וְנַקֵּה, which yields the opposite meaning, “[YHWH] remits punishment.” Although this edit is surprising, the rabbis are responding to a serious tension in the biblical text: Is YHWH a merciful God who pardons, or a vengeful God who will never remit punishment?

When does God reward and when does God inflict punishment and why? A comparison of the books of Kings and Chronicles demonstrates that the Chronicler, troubled by the theology of Kings in which children can be punished for the sins of their parents, rewrote Israel’s history.

A Mysterious Transgression or a Mysterious Deity?

The free-will conundrum of God hardening Pharaoh’s heart—a supplementary approach.

Inaugurating TheTorah.com

After the shocking death of Nadav and Avihu, Moses says to Aaron that this is what God meant when he said, “through those near to me I will sanctify Myself.”  Rashi, Rashbam, and Nahmanides struggle to understand the meaning of Moses’ message.

The liturgical readings of Rosh Hashanah tell of Sarah, Rachel, and Hannah being “remembered” by God, making barrenness and conception the locus of divine providence.

A fire comes forth from God and devours Nadav and Avihu but God does not actually say anything. It is Moses who infers what God was communicating through this act and even formulates a law based on his understanding of God’s message.

Sommer asks, “Can observant Judaism and modern biblical scholarship happily and honestly co-exist?” I’m concerned only with honesty, and will argue that Sommer’s theology fails to give an account of authoritativeness consistent with a commitment to biblical scholarship.

The approaches in Lamentations

Notwithstanding modern day biblical critical and historical critical claims, applying the tools of contemporary philosophy demonstrates how room still exists to have faith that something extraordinary happened to our ancestors and that this event had a permanent effect on the development of Torah and Judaism.

The Rabbis describe how the ritual of ניסוך המים (water libation), which they believed was to have occurred every Sukkot in the Temple, was a point of contention between the Pharisees and the Sadducees, but why was it so contentious and what was at stake in its performance?

Literature and art are replete with images of angels descending to earth and joining humanity. One source for this image is a terse account in Genesis describing fallen angels, which is expanded upon in Second Temple literature. This interpretive tradition is suppressed in the classic rabbinic literature only to resurface again in the late narrative midrash, Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer.

A comparative theological view

The Difference between God’s “Name (שם)” and “Presence (כבוד)”

Unlike the Priestly writers for whom sacrifice and rituals are needed to maintain the divine presence in the Tabernacle, the Deuteronomists stress God’s transcendence and the obedience of the heart and soul.

The meaning of God’s names, especially YHWH, is central to Jewish theology. Two approaches have dominated: the philosophical, focusing on God’s essence (“being”) and the kabbalistic, focusing on God’s evolving relationship with Israel (“becoming”). Some modern thinkers such as Malbim and Heschel have looked for new syntheses or formulations.

Divine beings come to earth and have offspring with human women (Genesis 6). What is a story which sounds like a pagan myth doing in the Torah?

The two creation stories of Genesis, chapters 1 and 2-3 (P and J) introduce two long narratives which continue throughout much of the Torah. Each is working with a different conception of the creator—a rather human-like God versus a majestic and distant deity.

What makes a material suitable for constructing a sacred space, and why, given all of the details and repetitions concerning the Tabernacle, are none of its manufacturing techniques narrated?

Theologians of the ancient Near East made sense of idolatry through the ritual dedication of the statues that made them into gods.

In the ancient Near East, laments were written to mourn past destructions or to prevent future destructions. With which type of lament were the authors of Lamentations familiar?