101 Under-the-Radar Things About Judaism
Enjoy these often inconspicuous aspects of Judaism, which we break down into Jewish culture and lifestyle, Jewish wisdom, Jewish Peoplehood, Jewish history, the State of Israel, and Hebrew.
✡️ Culture & Lifestyle
1.
The number seven might be Judaism’s most significant number.
It is the Divine number of completion (and therefore the day of rest); the Seven Laws of Noah and the seven of every clean animal in his famous ark; the menorah in the Temple had seven lamps; the shiva (the mourning period following one’s death) lasts seven days, and the term shiva refers to the seven-day period.
Seven is also the number of weeks that we count the Omer from the second day of Passover until the festival of Shavuot. A Jewish woman in niddah following menstruation must count seven “clean days” prior to immersion in the mikvah. And it’s the number of days for the Jewish holidays, Sukkot and Passover, and the number of aliyot (worshipers who are called up to read an assigned passage from the Torah) on Shabbat.
What’s more, the sabbath year (shmita) is the seventh year of the seven-year agricultural cycle mandated by the Torah for the Land of Israel.
2.
Having a fixed day of rest, the Sabbath, was most likely first practiced in Judaism, dating back to the sixth century BCE, according to Eviatar Zerubavel in his book, The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week. In 1908, the first five-day workweek in the United States was instituted by a New England cotton mill, so that Jewish workers didn’t need to work on the Sabbath from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday.1
3.
Menachem Mendel Schneerson (better known as “The Rebbe”) once asked a question to a Russian-Israeli pioneer in magnetohydrodynamics.
“What is the unique quality of the sun, which makes everyone consider it a blessing?” The Rebbe asked him. “It is, of course, its capacity to give light to the earth. What would happen if the sun had the same temperature, the same energy, but did not radiate or give heat? Indeed, there are such stars, called black holes, the force of attraction of which is so strong that not even one light ray can depart from them.
“If the sun were such a star, whom would it benefit then? Of what use would the sun be if it were a black hole?” he asked. “So it is with the Jew whose primary function is to put forth light, to radiate, to better a fellow … Without this, such a person would turn into a black hole, when he or she was created to be a sun.”
4.
Judaism is perhaps the only religious civilization all of whose canonical texts are anthologies of arguments. In the Bible, the prophets argue with God. In the Mishnah, rabbis argue with one another. The Talmud, rather than resolving the arguments, deepens them.2
5.
Do you know how the Chinese translate the word Judaism? This is how they write it: 挑筋教. The translation reads: “religion of the removed sinew.”3
According to the Torah: “… the children of Israel may not consume the sinew that was displaced, which lies upon the ‘spoon’ of the thigh, since he struck the ‘spoon’ of Yaakov’s thigh on the displaced sinew.”
Interestingly, instead of calling us “the people of the book” or “the nation that left Egypt,” the Chinese define us otherwise, and remind us of something very deep: Judaism survives not only because of beliefs, ideas, or philosophies, but rather because of what we do, including what we eat.
6.
Rabbi Ken Spiro, author of WorldPerfect – The Jewish Impact on Civilization, asserts that the Jewish People are “history’s most universal particularists,” saying: “The Jewish People have always pushed a universal worldview, an idea of the whole human race united … [We are] particularists in that the Jewish People are supposed to do this, not at the expense of their identity, but by preserving their Jewish identity as a role model.”4
7.
The Talmud provides an example of the critical role relationships play, most significantly when describing the atmosphere of the beit midrash, a Torah study hall fueled by vibrant and demanding relationships among its students.
Learning in a beit midrash is not just an act of transition where knowledge is transferred from person to person or from generation to generation; it is an act of creative disruption, always leading to newness.
The educator claims no authority over the Torah — and they demand of their students to teach them. The relationship between educator and student is a sacred encounter, contributing to the ongoing and never-ending understanding of Torah.
“In Judaism, as opposed to, say, Catholicism, there is no clear authority or doctrine,” author Judith Shulevitz wrote.5
8.
Wade Boggs, a former third baseman for the Boston Red Sox, woke up at the same time each day, ate chicken before each game, took exactly 117 ground balls in practice, participated in batting practice at 5:17 pm, and ran sprints at 7:17 pm. Boggs also wrote the Hebrew word chai (“living”) in the dirt before each at-bat.
Jewish rituals tend to get a bad rap. But what if we, like Boggs, turned Jewish rituals into our own personal benefits? What if we made a Jewish ritual less about it and more about us? This is what I aimed to do when I started wearing a kippah.
9.
Public education as we know it might have also been a Jewish invention. Elementary school learning was regarded as compulsory by Simeon ben Shetah as early as 75 BCE and Joshua ben Gamla in 64 CE. The education of older boys and men in a beit midrash (study hall) goes back to the Second Temple period.
And the Talmud stresses importance of education, stating that children should begin school at age six. Rabbis added that they should not be beaten with a stick or cane, that older students should help younger ones, and that children should not be kept from their lessons by other duties.
10.
Even when hierarchy existed in ancient Israel (for protocol purposes), the scholar sat at the top. That’s right, the scholar, even before the king! Why? According to the Talmud: “A scholar takes precedence over a king of Israel, because if a scholar dies there is no one to replace him; but if a king of Israel dies, anybody in Israel is eligible to replace him.”
In Judaism, we revere scholars. In the synagogue we seat them in the place of honor. We even have a special blessing to be said on seeing one — two blessings, in fact, one for religious scholars, another for secular ones.6
11.
To be sure, the Bible is the basis of Judaism. But Judaism as it is practiced today is not biblical; it’s rabbinic, which means that it’s about studying and engaging with the text, yet not stopping at face value. According to Rabbi Geoffrey Mitelman, when Jews today read the Bible through a rabbinic worldview, we are trying to answer two separate questions: First, what did the text mean in its time; and second, how can we create interpretations that will give us lessons for our time?7
Rabbi Mitelman says that there’s a question which incessantly recurs in rabbinic literature: “How do we know this?” The rabbis always had to explain their reasoning. And if there was a choice between believing something because of a Divine miracle, or believing something because of thoughtful and reasoned arguments, there was no question which one the rabbis would accept: Reason and logic would always win.
12.
According to Rabbi David Rosen, the central significance of family is emphasized by the Bible in its narrative dealing with the trailblazer of ethical monotheism, the first patriarch, Abraham.8
“Despite his pioneering achievements in bringing the knowledge of the one God,” Rosen wrote, “Abraham nevertheless yearned to be blessed with his own progeny; to have the full family network in which the profundity of spiritual and ethical commitment may be most fully transmitted … Not without portent then, it is the extension of the family of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — known as the children of Israel — that becomes the nation. Indeed the nation is the sum total of its families and thus the nation lives up to its metier, when its families live up to their sacred task as sanctuaries of Jewish life.”
13.
The tenets of communal good within Jewish moral identity were developed across nineteen centuries. As early as the 13th century, Jewish communities in medieval Spain were pioneering early versions of a welfare state, complete with public education, provisions for orphans, and alms for the poor distributed from social funds, according to Moshe Halbertal, Professor of Jewish Thought and Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.9
Over time, this sense of concern for the communal good would be matched by an ever-expanding sense of Jewish obligation to the world at large, in what Rabbi David Wolpe calls “an ascending spiral of insularity and openness” in terms of the locus of Jewish social concern.10
“This is not accidental,” New York Times editor Bret Stephens wrote. “Other nations, with sovereign powers and normal politics, could aggressively pursue their interests with only glancing regard for moral issues. The Jewish nation, with neither sovereign powers nor normal politics until the creation of the State of Israel, had much less latitude as far as its interests were concerned, but more scope to explore its values. For better and worse, political powerlessness went a long way to spark Jewish moral imagination as well as indignation — a self-reinforcing process.”11
14.
“What Jews value in a leader is very different than what one sees in the rest of the world,” wrote Rabbi Shaul Rosenblatt. “A leader is not chosen for his oratory. If Moses had needed to debate Obama, he would have stood no chance. He is not chosen for how much he appeals to the electorate, or that ‘wow’ factor that plays so well on the nightly news.”
“A Jewish leader is chosen for very different reasons,” he continued. “He is chosen for his humility. Moses and Saul had something in common: Neither was interested in the job. And that’s what made them the ideal candidates. Because it’s so hard for a leader to distinguish between his desire to serve the people and his desire to serve himself.”12
15.
Awareness seems to be having its 15 minutes of fame. Think: self-awareness, mindfulness, Breast Cancer Awareness Month. But could it be true that Jews were radically aware before awareness became a thing?
Dr. Einat Ramon, a senior lecturer in Jewish thought and Jewish women’s studies at The Schechter Institutes, said that the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur is the “awareness of our human vulnerability.”13 And Rabbi Jeremy Schwartz calls the Torah “a tool of awareness” which “keeps us awake to the world around us and demands that we respond with holy consciousness.”14
Hence why, according to the late, great Rabbi Noah Weinberg, in Judaism we “go a lot deeper” and say “clarity or death,” adding: “‘Death’ is the complete absence of consciousness; reduced consciousness is therefore partial death. Either you know what you are living for, you know what you want, you know what your pleasure is — or else you are living like a zombie … Jewish consciousness is that before doing anything,” he added, “you should stop and ask yourself: Why am I doing this?”15
16.
“Judaism combines a liberal, utopian, universal vision of completely transforming the planet with a conservative, realistic, particularist method of transformation. The interplay between these elements advances revolutionary ideals while preventing runaway excesses or socially destructive overreach. Typically, this leads to gradualist, incrementalist steps toward ultimate perfection.” — Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, president of the J.J. Greenberg Institute16
17.
The Hebrew word for charity, tzedakah, shares the same root as tzedek, meaning “justice” — an insinuation that charity is basically a way of rectifying the world, an ontological requirement. Jewish tradition says, though, that while helping someone desperately in need of money is one thing, putting him back on his own two feet is a greater one.
Maimonides, the 12th-century Jewish sage who concocted the “Eight Levels of Charity,” referred to this as the act of strengthening one’s hand so that he or she won’t need to be dependent on others, the highest of these eight levels.
18.
Participants in a Duke University study about observing the Sabbath for three-to-four days each month were significantly more likely to report higher spiritual wellbeing and quality of life scores, and were more likely to possess flourishing mental health. Furthermore, they were significantly less likely to have scores that qualified them for depression, anxiety, or any of the three kinds of burnout (emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and lack of personal accomplishment).17
19.
The 16th-century Italian Jewish commentator Obadiah Sforno is known, in part, for his metaphor that urged those under threat and challenge to bend like a reed instead of trying to stand tall like a cedar (and risk destruction).18 Plus, many scholars and communal leaders have argued (historians chief among them) that Jewish tradition has survived precisely because of its adaptability.19
20.
Judaism places a premium on education, study, and the life of the mind. As a text-based religion, it makes literacy a primary duty. The Talmud ranks study even higher than prayer as a religious act. Judaism’s citadels, from at least the time of the Babylonian exile, were its schools and academies. In Jewish law, building a school takes precedence over opening a synagogue.20
21.
“To be a Jew is to live in the cognitive dissonance between the world that is and the world that ought to be.” — Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks21
🧠 Wisdom
22.
The benefits of empathic, active listening are evident in the Talmud, by way of Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai, two schools of thought that frequently disagreed about Jewish law. Beit Hillel generally posited more lenient positions, while Beit Shammai usually held stricter ones. Beit Shammai’s legal rulings were just as valid as those of Beit Hillel, yet with a few rare exceptions, we follow the latter. But why? Because Beit Hillel’s students were kind and humble, and always quoted the other side’s opinions before their own.
“The reason is that they were agreeable and forbearing, showing restraint when affronted, and when they taught the halakha (Jewish law), they would teach both their own statements and the statements of Beit Shammai,” according to Rabbi Shuli Passow. “Moreover, when they formulated their teachings and cited a dispute, they prioritized the statements of Beit Shammai to their own statements, in deference to Beit Shammai.”22
23.
In the Torah, when Moses unleashed the plagues on Egypt, he wasn’t the one who initiated the Nile River turning into blood and brought frogs from the river; his brother Aaron invoked these plagues. The medieval commentator Rashi explained that the river protected Moses when he was an infant. Therefore, he could not start a plague against it. God was teaching Moses a powerful lesson in gratitude: We can open in gratitude even to inanimate objects.23
24.
Lashon ha’ra — literally translating to “bad tongue” in Hebrew — is the halakhic (Jewish legal) term for derogatory speech about a person, which emotionally or financially damages them or lowers them in the estimation of others. Hence why Judaism asks us to not engage in slander and malicious gossip.24
25.
Helping others help themselves is the highest form of charity. The Hebrew word for charity, tzedakah, essentially means “justice” — a profound idea in itself, saying that charity is basically a way of rectifying the world, an ontological requirement. Jewish tradition says, though, that while helping someone desperately in need of money is one thing, putting him back on his own two feet — by encouraging him, helping him find a job, et cetera — is a greater one.25
26.
The Torah articulates the obligation to love the stranger 36 times, far more than it does the obligation to keep kosher or observe Shabbat.26 And our tradition teaches that “anyone who destroys a single life is considered … to have destroyed a world, and anyone who saves a life is considered to have saved an entire world.”27
27.
Explaining an idea to others forces you to clarify it for yourself. You examine everything much more thoroughly — the details, logical progression, et cetera. And you’ll become personally moved by the idea. As the Jewish sages said: “I learned a lot from my teachers. I learned even more from my colleagues. But most of all, I learned from my students.”28
28.
In Ethics of the Fathers from the Mishnah, this tractate states that they are seven behaviors which separate a boor (a crude, rude individual) and a wise person: A wise person does not speak before one who is greater than them in wisdom or age; they do not interrupt his fellow’s words; they do not hasten to answer; their questions are on the subject and their answers are to the point; they respond to first things first and to later things later; concerning what they did not hear, they say: “I did not hear;” and they concede to the truth.
29.
The advice na’aseh v’nishma — “We will do and we will hear.” in Hebrew — comes from the Bible, because during biblical times, the Jewish People promised first to observe the laws of the Torah, and only afterward to study these laws. Hence why Judaism is often said to be a culture of deed rather than of intention. “There is in the spirit of our people, something special, even if we do not know what it is, that makes it swerve from the smooth path of other nations,” the legendary Hebrew essayist Aham Ha’am once said.
30.
The Torah isn’t a history book, a physics book, or a storybook. Rather, it is Torat Chaim, literally “theories for living.”
Some people use the excuse, “I’m too old to begin learning.” But the Talmudic scholar Rabbi Akiva didn’t even learn the Aleph-Bet (the Hebrew alphabet) until he was 40 years old. This is the same Rabbi Akiva who became the greatest sage of his generation with some 24,000 students!
31.
The Torah tells us that “two are better than one.” Why? Because we can be more objective about others’ mistakes than about our own.
The Talmud speaks about the great scholar Rabbi Yochanan and his study partner Reish Lakish. The two learned together for many years, until one day Reish Lakish became sick and died. Rabbi Yochanan was totally distraught over the loss. His students tried to comfort him by saying, “Don’t worry, Rabbi. We’ll find you a new study partner — the most brilliant man in town.”
A few weeks later, Rabbi Yochanan was seen walking down the street, totally depressed. “Rabbi, what’s the problem?” his students asked. “We sent you a brilliant study partner. Why are you so sad?”
Rabbi Yochanan told them: “He is indeed a scholar. In fact, he’s so brilliant that he can come up with 24 ways to prove what I’m saying is correct. But when I studied with Reish Lakish, he brought 24 proofs that I was wrong. And that’s what I miss! I want a partner who will criticize and question. That’s what Torah study is all about.”
32.
In the eleventh century, Maimonides claimed that any time you find a clash, a contradiction, between science and the Torah, it’s one of two possibilities: either you’re not reading the Torah properly, or you’re not understanding science properly. Either the science got it wrong, or those who are telling you what the Torah says are getting it wrong.29
33.
As the Talmud says: The way to tell if an argument is sincerely about the truth, is when both people come out loving each other more in the end. It isn’t easy, but it’s worthwhile.
34.
Judaism trains you in the multiple interpretations that can be given to any text. There are, said the rabbis, “seventy faces” to every verse in the Bible. The idea that meaning is simple — fundamentalism, we call it nowadays — is alien to the Jewish mind. Truth is rarely on the surface. So we seek the hidden patterns, the paradigm-shifting readings, the music beneath the noise.30
35.
According to one famous story in the Talmud, a potential Jewish convert approached Rabbi Hillel, saying: “I’ll convert to Judaism if you can share the entire Torah standing on one foot.” Without missing a beat, Hillel replied: “What is hateful to you, do not do unto others. That is the whole Torah, the rest is commentary. Now go learn them.”31
36.
Judaism loves chiddush, the new insight, the pattern that was always there but few noticed before. Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, one of the great Jewish thinkers of the 20th century, spoke lyrically of this rabbinic cultural feature. The man of faith, he said, is creative, and his greatest creation is himself.32
37.
In another talmudic tale, Honi the Circle Maker saw a man planting a carob tree and asked him how long it takes to bear fruit. “70 years,” the man replied, to which Honi wondered aloud, “Are you certain that you will live another 70 years?” The man pondered Honi’s question, and then said, “I found carob trees in this world planted for me by my ancestors, so I am planting these for my descendants.”33
38.
Contrast a library with a beit midrash (study hall) — in the former you can hear a pin drop, and in the latter you are submerged in a cacophonous sea of sound. Jews learn in a raucous manner because saying things out loud is a powerful tool to gain clarity and wisdom, according to the late, great Rabbi Noah Weinberg. Hence the Hebrew term of arichat sfatai’im, which literally means “arranging it on the lips.”34
39.
The late Rabbi Harold Schulweis distinguished the meaning of chutzpah as stubbornness and contrariness from what he called a tradition of “spiritual audacity” — or in Hebrew, chutzpah klapei shmaya. “We are conventionally raised to believe that Jewish faith demands unwavering obedience to the law and the law-giver. That attitude tends to cultivate a temperament of compliance and passivity; for conventional thinking, ‘talking back to God’ smacks of heresy,” Rabbi Schulweis said. “But a significant genre of religious, moral, and spiritual audacity toward the divine authority finds a place of honor in Jewish religious thought.”35
40.
The late Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate, Elie Wiesel, said that Jewish pride doesn’t necessarily seek to make the world more Jewish, but rather more human.
41.
Turns out, Judaism places great emphasis on forgiveness. The Torah explicitly forbids us to take revenge or to bear grudges.11
There is also mechilah, slichah, and kaparah. The most basic kind of forgiveness is “forgoing the other’s indebtedness” (mechilah). If the offender has done t’shuvah (repentance), and is sincere in doing so, the offended person should offer mechilah; that is, they should relinquish their claim against the offender. The second kind of forgiveness is slichah — “an act of the heart,” according to Rabbi David Blumenthal. And kaparah (atonement) is the ultimate form of forgiveness.36
42.
Maimonides saw is that there is not a single model of the virtuous life. He identifies two, calling them respectively the way of the saint (chasid) and the way of the sage (chacham). The sage follows the “golden mean,” the “middle way,” a matter of moderation and balance. Courage, for example, lies midway between cowardice and recklessness. Generosity lies between profligacy and miserliness.
The saint, by contrast, tends to extremes, fasting rather than simply eating in moderation, embracing poverty rather than acquiring modest wealth, and so on. At various points in his writings, Maimonides explains why people might embrace extremes. One reason is repentance and character transformation.
Is the aim of the moral life to achieve personal perfection? Or is it to create a decent, just, and compassionate society? The intuitive answer of most people would be to say: both. That is what makes Rambam so acute a thinker. He realizes that you cannot have both. They are in fact different enterprises.
Maimonides lived the life he preached. He longed for seclusion, yet he also recognized his responsibilities to his family and to the community. Maimonides was a sage who longed to be a saint, but knew he could not be, if he was to honor his responsibilities to his people.
“That is a profound and moving judgment,” the late, great Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks wrote, “and one that still has the power to inspire today.”37
43.
The great teaching of the Mishnah (the Oral Torah) asks, “Who is rich?” and then answers: “Those who rejoice in their own lot.”38 And when Leah, wife of the patriarch Jacob, had her fourth child, she named him Yehudah, which means “I am grateful,” to reflect her gratitude to God for the gift of another son. The name Yehudah is the source of the Hebrew word of the Jewish People (Yehudim), revealing the direct connection between Judaism and gratitude.
44.
Rabbi Shmuel de Uceda, commenting on the Mishnah that states a person is considered wise if he learns from everyone, pointed out that we rarely find the appellation “chacham” (wise person) in the Talmud. Rather, a person is referred to as being a “talmid chacham” (wise student). In other words, a person cannot be called wise (chacham) unless he is also a student (talmid).39 Wisdom requires the mindset that we ought to always learn and grow; there is never a fixed state of being wise or intelligent.
45.
For compelling moral reasons, Jews have tended to prefer the power of ideas to the idea of power.
There are three ways of changing the world. You can force people to change, you can pay them to change, or you can inspire them to change. The first is the way of politics and power, the second of economics and the market, but the third is the way of the academy and the house of study. What makes the third better than the other two is that, in the short term at least, power and wealth are zero sum games.
The more I share, the less I have. Knowledge, insight, and teaching are non-zero. The more I share, the more I have. The more I teach, the more I learn.40
46.
While Jewish tradition and scientific reasoning occasionally offer two divergent sources of truth, Judaism and science share the convictions that our world is very much real and tangible, that the world and the actions of human beings matter, and that there is order to be found, according to Professor Roald Hoffmann, a Nobel Laureate in Chemistry.41
In his ELI Talk, Rabbi Geoffrey Mitelman said:
“Yes they deal with different subjects, yes they come at it from different perspectives, but they’re both ultimately trying to answer the question: What does it mean to be human? How can I be a better person? How can I make our world a little bit more whole? Even though science and religion deal with different questions, even though the Torah is not a science textbook, we can use the best of science and the best of religion in the service of making ourselves and our world a little bit better, a little bit more whole.”
👪 Peoplehood
47.
“Being Jewish is defined by membership in the People and not by religion. The Jews have a religion, but Judaism is not a religion. The moment you define Judaism as a religion, the first thing that happens is you create religious denominations. Where was Reform, even Orthodox Judaism, 700 years ago? They did not exist because we did not define ourselves as a religion.” — Avraham Infeld, President Emeritus of Hillel International42
48.
As a young man, Theodor Herzl was an ardent Germanophile who saw the Germans as the best cultured people in Central Europe, and believed Hungarian Jews such as himself could shake off their “shameful Jewish characteristics” caused by long centuries of impoverishment and oppression, and become civilized Central Europeans, a true cultured person along the German lines. Needless to say, Herzl went on to become the father of modern-day Zionism.
These is just one of the infinite stories about people who have experienced Jewish late blooming.
49.
Jews have been the head of state in Latvia, New Zealand, Singapore, Guyana, Peru, Ukraine, and Gibraltar.43
50.
“I’ve realized that just because you’re Jewish, that doesn’t mean you necessarily understand or know aspects of our experience as a people. We’re taught about the Shoah (the Holocaust), we’re taught about pogroms — but there’s a lot about our experience that people aren’t aware of … So I think it’s about exploring our history as a people. We have an amazing story and we should learn it.” — Ben Freeman, author of Jewish Pride: Rebuilding a People44
51.
Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe, in his work Alei Shor, cites a midrash (rabbinic interpretation in the Talmud) in which each person at Mount Sinai experienced revelation according to their ability.45 He connects this to an idea from Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto that “there are 600,000 explanations of the Torah, and each person received an interpretation according to the root of his/her soul.”46
This is where the delicate balance between Jewish individualism and collectivism comes into play. Each of us is one of these 600,000 explanations, no explanation greater or lesser than the others, just different. As such, this requires an imperative humility to acknowledge that each of us contains only a partial truth, and that predominately running in circles with others who share our like-minded partial truths only makes our partial truths more partial.
52.
“The Jews’ greatest contribution to history is dissatisfaction,” the greater Israeli statesman, Shimon Peres, said. “We’re a nation born to be discontented. Whatever exists we believe can be changed for the better.”
53.
Do you know the joke about Israelis who relocate to other countries and then return to Israel? It goes like this: They leave Israel as Israelis and come back to Israel as Jews — because they discover that living in a Jewish state should not be taken for granted. This prompts them to take more pride in Judaism and their Jewishness, and it’s why many Israelis will never wear a Jewish star necklace while living in Israel, yet often wear one while living abroad.
54.
Isidor Straus was co-founder of the Macy’s Department Store. Ida Straus was his wife. The Jewish couple was known for their devout love among each other, almost always together and writing daily to each other when apart.
On April 14, 1912, they were passengers on the Titanic, immediately after a trip to pre-state Israel. As the ship began to sink, Ida alone was offered refuge in a lifeboat. She refused. “We have lived together for many years,” she said to her husband. “Where you go, I go.”
The two were then offered seats in another lifeboat, but with many women and children still on the crumbling Titanic, Isidor declined to take the seat. Once again, his wife refused as well. Passengers allegedly remarked that what they saw was a “most remarkable exhibition of love and devotion.” The couple was last seen sitting side-by-side on Titanic’s Boat Deck.
55.
In 2022, the London-based Institute for Jewish Policy Research published a first-of-its kind study, which posited that one out of every seven Jews in the world today is ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi. And if current trends continue, the study predicted that nearly one out of every four Jews in the world will be Haredi by 2040.
56.
In the final months of his life, an exile in London, dying of cancer, Vienna occupied by the Nazis, Sigmund Freud took up again a manuscript that he had put aside years before: Moses and Monotheism. In the last section of the book, he argued that in choosing to worship an invisible God, Jews had made the right choice. We opted for the intellectual, not the physical, “subordinating sense perception to an abstract idea.”47
57.
“The atrocities of the Middle Ages were unprecedented, and the people who withstood those tortures must have had some great strength, an inner unity which we have lost. A generation which has grown apart from Judaism does not have this unity. It can neither rely upon our past nor look to our future. That is why we shall once more retreat into Judaism and never again permit ourselves to be thrown out of this fortress… We shall thereby regain our lost inner wholeness and along with it a little character — our own character. Not a Marrano-like, borrowed, untruthful character, but our own.” — Theodor Herzl
58.
Great Jewish leaders emerge from unlikely beginnings. Moses grew up in the Egyptian palace, presumably learning the arts of political leadership necessary to rule a people. The great sage, Rabbi Akiva, was an uneducated shepherd until middle age, when he became a master teacher of the Torah. Ze’ev Jabotinsky — the warrior founder of the Jewish state and Zionist youth movement — grew up immersed in high Russian and Western culture.
Golda Meir ran away from home at age 14 because she didn’t want to fulfill her mother’s wishes of leaving school to get married, and went on to become the first and only female prime minister of Israel. And Natan Sharansky was jailed by the KGB in the former Soviet Union for nearly a decade before ascending to be one of Israel’s great leaders.
59.
Traumatic events can affect our biology. Led by Rachel Yehuda, a research team at New York’s Mount Sinai hospital found that genetic changes stemming from the trauma suffered by Holocaust survivors are capable of being passed on to their children.48 Yehuda and her colleagues also analyzed the genes of their children, who are known to have increased likelihood of stress disorders, and compared the results with Jewish families who were living outside of Europe during the war.
“The gene changes in the children could only be attributed to Holocaust exposure in the parents,” Yehuda said.
60.
In 1756, Voltaire wrote a sharply antisemitic essay about the Jews. They had, he said, contributed nothing to civilization. Their religion was borrowed, their faith superstitious, their originality nonexistent. They were “an ignorant and barbarous people.” Still, he added, “we ought not to burn them.”49
In the course of the next two centuries, Jews (or individuals of Jewish descent) became pioneers in almost every field of endeavor: Einstein, Bohr, Durkheim, Levi-Strauss, Freud, Adler, Klein, Spinoza, Bergson, Wittgenstein, Mahler, Schoenberg, Heine, Bellow, Agnon. The litany has become a cliché: Less than a fifth of a percent of the population of the world, Jews have won more than 20-percent of all Nobel prizes.
61.
When it comes to the Jewish People, no small group is more diverse ethnically, culturally, attitudinally, and religiously.
“Diversity is a sign of strength — not weakness,” the late, great Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks wrote.50
As Rabbi Yechiel Michel Epstein offered in his 1884 book, Aruch HaShulchan, Moses doesn’t use the word Torah in the last of the 613 commandments. Rather, he proclaims the Hebrew word shirah (song) because, in this respect, Torah is like music: Its greatest beauty lies in complex harmonies. And, as the Netziv wrote in his commentary on the Tower of Babel, uniformity of thought is not a sign of freedom, but its opposite.51
62.
The list of Jewish entertainers who changed their public names includes: Bob Dylan, Joan Rivers, Jon Stewart, Natalie Portman, Gene Simmons, Winona Ryder, George Burns, Selma Blair, Kirk Douglas, and Rodney Dangerfield.
63.
Jews were exiled from Jerusalem and the Second Temple was destroyed 2,000 years ago, not because of the Roman legion’s insurmountable strength, but because we Jews “couldn’t get along with each other within,” former Israeli Member of Knesset Dov Kipman said on The Future of Jewish podcast, adding:
“There’s an amazing power when we’re unified and able to function together as a people, and once we lose that, our enemies that always seek to destroy us are able to come in and make that happen.”
64.
As a child, Israeli-born Itzhak Perlman was denied admission to a music school for being too small to hold the violin. Today, at age 76, he is a violinist who has earned 16 Grammy Awards, including a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, as well as four Emmy Awards and the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Perlman has also performed worldwide and in venues that have included a State Dinner at the White House honoring Queen Elizabeth II, and at U.S. President Barack Obama’s inauguration.
65.
In his book, Flexigidity, Gidi Grinstein shows that the secret sauce of Jewish survival, security, prosperity, and leadership has been the jammed-together, counterpoint traits of flexibility and rigidity. The essential character traits of Jewish experience. This means optimizing the pace of collective adaptation by balancing the timeless and contemporary, the innovative and traditional, the historical and modern.
Through this balancing act, Judaism has flowed like water through millennia of dramatic changes, able to bend and pivot flexibly in response to externally changing conditions. Hence why Friedrich Nietzsche called the Jews “the adaptable nation par excellence.”52
🇮🇱 Israel
66.
Forty years ago in New York City, the great Israeli scholar Adin Steinsaltz predicted that “Israeli Judaism and Diaspora Judaism would evolve in different ways, as the Babylonian Talmud and the Jerusalem Talmud differ.”53
67.
“Judaism without Zionism is self-destructive; but Zionism without Judaism is meaningless.” — Steve Stulman, founder of The Julius Stulman Foundation54
68.
When the State of Israel was founded in 1948, only six-percent of the world’s Jewry lived there. Today, the number is approximately 40-percent.
69.
Theodor Herzl, the father of modern-day Zionism, initially contemplated two possible destinations for a Jewish state, Argentina and Palestine, preferring Argentina for its vast and sparsely populated territory and temperate climate, but conceded that Palestine would have greater attraction due to the Jews’ historic ties with this area.
70.
The four holy cities of Judaism are Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias.
71.
Israel has the most startups, vegans, museums, and college degrees per capita of any country in the world.
72.
Israel’s national anthem, HaTikva, originated from a Jewish poem, and the Israeli flag is symbolic of a tallit (a special garment worn by Jews during prayer and in the service of God).
73.
In 1948, the year in which the State of Israel was established, the Israeli government passed a law declaring Shabbat the official day of rest. This meant that, in most localities, commercial businesses were ordered to be closed, public transportation did not operate on Shabbat (Friday sundown to Saturday sundown), government agencies and government-controlled corporations were officially Shabbat-observant, and the Israeli workweek is from Sunday to Thursday. Those who did not abide by these laws received fines. In many places across Israel today, this remains the case.
74.
Jerusalem, not Tel Aviv, is Israel’s largest municipality, both in terms of population size and land mass. It is also its capital, even though the Israeli Declaration of Independence in 1948 was signed in Tel Aviv.
75.
Following the death of King Solomon, circa 931 BCE, a civil war divided our ancestors into two kingdoms, Israel and Judah. The prophets foretold that, in Messianic times, we would reunite into a single nation again. The Ten Tribes of Israel were “lost” in the Assyrian exile, and we are descended from Judah, which is why we’re called Jews.55 When our modern state was founded in 1948, we didn’t call it Judah; we called it Israel, representing our spirit of unity.
“Separated by civil war, hundreds of years as separate nations, thousands of years lost in exile, yet they are still our brethren, for whose return we long,” Rabbi Steven Burg wrote.56
76.
Once upon a time there was a tourist in Israel, looking for parking with his rental car. He saw a bunch of cars parked on the sidewalk, which is completely illegal in his country, so finally he saw a police officer and asked him if it was legal to park on the sidewalk alongside the other cars. “No, it’s not legal,” the officer told him. “So why can other people park their cars on the sidewalk?” he asked the officer, who replied: “Because they didn’t ask.”
Such is the case in Israel. In fact, there’s a Hebrew slang term, which originated in the Israeli army, for such situations — sh’elat kitbag (kitbag question) — meaning questions that receive an unfavorable response only when they are asked.
77.
In Israel, pigs are not allowed to touch the ground and must be raised on wooden platforms, because they are a non-kosher animal. Additionally, anyone who works at a winery in Israel and comes into contact with the wine at any point during production, must keep kosher, in order for the wine to be kosher.
78.
On May 24, 1991, the Israel Defense Forces carried out Operation Solomon, a massive airlift that brought Ethiopian Jews to Israel. After 34 planes and 36 hours, the Israeli Air Force safely carried 14,500 Jews to Israeli soil, a mission which remains the largest aerial expedition in Israel’s history.
Some 1,100 people crammed into one of these planes, which set (and still holds) the Guinness World Record for the greatest number of passengers ever carried by a commercial airliner.
79.
Many people believe that the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict shapes the Middle East, but the reality in many cases is that the Middle East shapes the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, at least according to Avi Melamed, a former Israeli Intelligence Official and Senior Official on Arab Affairs. For more context and depth, check out this episode of The Future of Jewish podcast:
📜 History
80.
Jewish sages used to ask: Why was the Torah presented to Jews in a desert? Because deserts are empty, a metaphor that we can only accept wisdom when we create space for it.
81.
In 586 BCE, the Temple was destroyed, only to be rebuilt some 70 years later. Then, the Second Temple was destroyed in the year 70 CE, Jews were exiled from Jerusalem by the Romans, and most of this form of Judaism was completely crushed. Some elements have continued, such as marking time with those central holidays and rituals like Shabbat, but even many of the holidays evolved in their symbolism and how they were celebrated.
82.
The Greek term loudaismos (meaning “Judaism or “Jewish religion”) was in fact “initially coined to describe the religion of the Judeans in their opposition to the Hellenizing policies of their Syrian overlords,” according to the late James Dunn, a New Testament scholar.57
“The significance of this basic observation is that ‘Judaism’ in its beginnings is a term closely linked to a particular territory,” Dunn wrote. “Nor is it any accident that the term emerged in opposition to a policy intended to obliterate national and religious distinctiveness. It should be no surprise, in other words, that the term emerged in Greek, precisely as a way of marking out the Judeans’ distinctiveness within a wider Hellenism which valued commonality more than distinctiveness.”
83.
The 18th-century Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, himself observant, challenged the norms that defined religious belief and practice, especially in Judaism. His work was revolutionary and drew praise of the time’s transformational philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant. Jews were no longer forced to live in ghettos and wear clothing that marked them as different. This acceptance led to the birth of Reform Judaism in the early 1800s.
“The idea was to make Judaism into a system of belief that reflected modern times,” author Zack Bodner wrote, “while holding on to some eternal truths so the practitioner could choose which elements to incorporate into his or her life.”58
84.
Since the first centuries of the Common Era, most Jews lived outside the area commonly known as Palestine, following the destruction of the Second Temple and the massacre of the Jews in Jerusalem. Of the 600,000 (Tacitus) or one million (Josephus) Jews of Jerusalem, all of them either died of starvation, were killed, or were sold into slavery. A minority presence of Jews has been attested for almost all of the period. For example, according to tradition, the Jewish community of Peki’in has maintained a Jewish presence since the Second Temple period.
85.
King Solomon, the third leader of the Jewish Kingdom, is thought of as a sage and a man of great wisdom. People traveled great distances to seek his counsel.
But what’s less remembered is that his personal life was not so pretty. He made bad decisions repeatedly, had uncontrolled passion for money and women, and neglected to instruct his only son, who went on to ruin the kingdom. In modern psychology, Solomon’s Paradox is the belief that we tend to reason more wisely about other people’s problems than our own.
86.
In 1819, Jewish settlements were proposed for establishment in the upper Mississippi, USA region by W.D. Robinson. Others were developed near Jerusalem in 1850 by the American Consul Warder Cresson, a convert to Judaism. Cresson was tried and condemned for lunacy in a suit filed by his wife and son, who asserted that only a lunatic would convert to Judaism from Christianity.
87.
Many people naturally assume that the values we hold dear have originated — as did democracy — with the Greeks and, to a lesser extent, with disseminators of Hellenistic, i.e. Greek ideas, the Romans. Traditionalists continue to insist that the values of ancient Greece and Rome underlie all our learning, philosophy, art, and ethics. Western law, government, administration, and engineering were also powerfully shaped by Rome. Indeed, we do overwhelmingly get the lion’s share of our culture from these civilizations.
But can the same be said about our values, ethics, and principles? How did we come to order our moral values in this particular way?
“I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation,” John Adams, the second president of the United States, once said. “Fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations.”
And Roman philosopher Deo Cassius wrote: “The Jews are distinguished from the rest of mankind in practically every detail of life.”
88.
David Harris, CEO of American Jewish Committee, wrote that being Jewish “means taking pride in the vast Jewish contribution to the defense of human dignity. Not by accident, the Hebrew Bible — from the exodus from Egypt to the very concept of the Promised Land — has been a source of inspiration for America’s Founding Fathers, as well as for the American civil rights movement (e.g., the African-American spiritual — ‘When Israel was in Egypt’s land, let my people go!’). And not by accident, either, Jews have been disproportionately represented in the forefront of the global struggle for the advancement of human rights.”59
89.
In the late Persian period, around 450-to-400 BCE, Jews for the first time became interested in producing scientific models of the natural world’s workings. The approach to nature displayed in the Enochic Book of the Heavenly Luminaries is unprecedented in Jewish literature. It seems to mark a turning-point in Jewish intellectual history — the emergence, for the first time, of what might properly be called a scientific attitude, which within society back then was radically new, all the way through the Middle Ages.
90.
A few decades ago, in the aftermath of the soul-debilitating Holocaust, many kibbutzim (plural for kibbutz) — the young State of Israel’s proverbial backbone for decades — invented a new kind of Passover Haggadah, with new interpretations of the traditional text, to convey the vision of a new type of Jew living in the newly established state, and to challenge the then-established concept of Jewish identity.60
Amira Eran, a Professor of Jewish Thought at Levinsky College of Education in Tel Aviv, examined and cross-referenced hundreds of kibbutz Haggadot (plural for Haggadah) and found four chief modifications among them:
Expansion of the notion of the Month of Spring to a full section dedicated to spring. Spring is regarded a symbol of new birth, end of dark times and revival. It emphasizes the stable relation to the fruit-giving land.
Expansion of the concept of Exodus as the move from the Diaspora to Eretz Israel, and from social oppression to social freedom
Extension of the flight from the Egypt to the fight for the security of the state of Israel.
Depiction of the redemption of the Jewish nation as dependent entirely on the achievement of people, not of divine intervention.
She also said that the main characteristics of the kibbutz which may be mentioned as relevant for this interpretation of the rabbinical texts, are: (a) being an idealistic collective organization, rather than a genetic family; (b) being workers of the land, rather than middle-class Talmud students, and (c) being a secular and active audience, rather than obedient and traditional observers.
91.
The term “ghetto” originated from the name of the Jewish quarter in Venice, Italy, where authorities urged the city’s Jews to live, starting from 1516. In the 16th and 17th centuries, officials ordered the creation of ghettos for Jews in Frankfurt, Rome, Prague, and other cities.61
Then, around 250 years ago, along came modern nationalism, and with it, modern liberalism. Suddenly, Jews had the opportunity to leave the ghetto, and many of them changed their understanding of what it meant to be Jewish. Some simply stopped being Jewish, and the Orthodox became more ghettoized. The majority of Jews, though, progressively became more assimilated — more American, more Argentinian, more German, et cetera — often at the expense of becoming less Jewish, at least in ghetto terms.
“The Enlightenment and emancipation of the Jew in the modern world brought great and wonderful opportunities, facilitating the gradual integration of the Jew into an increasingly open society,” according to Rabbi David Rosen. “However at the same time, it exposed him to arguably more insidious dangers. If it was not he whose way of life would be undermined by these, there was a good chance that he would lose his grandchildren to them … The blessings of modernity have sometimes proved to be curses.”62
92.
There’s a quote in the Book of Ezekiel, which suggests that even before the advent of modern science, Judaism understood that children bear the burden of their parents’ legacy: “The fathers ate sour grapes, and the children’s teeth were set on edge.”
In short, Jews carry symptoms of trauma that we didn’t personally experience. Especially since the historical Jewish experience includes repeatedly profound bouts of dislocation, homelessness, discrimination, prejudice, and even annihilation. This means that Jews might have recurrent feelings or exhibit behaviors which are not the result of any particular event in their own lives.
93.
“The Jewish question exists wherever Jews live in perceptible numbers,” Theodor Herzl wrote in a pamphlet called The Jewish State in 1896. “Where it does not exist, it is carried by Jews in the course of their migrations. We naturally move to those places where we are not persecuted, and there our presence produces persecution. This is the case in every country, and will remain so, even in those highly civilized — for instance, France — until the Jewish question finds a solution on a political basis. The unfortunate Jews are now carrying the seeds of antisemitism into England; they have already introduced it into America.”
🗣 Hebrew
94.
Eliezer Yitzhak Perlman (later Eliezer Ben-Yehuda) was born in the Russian Empire (now Belarus). By the age of twelve, he had read large portions of the Torah, Mishna, and Talmud. Ben-Yehuda’s mother and uncle hoped he would become a rabbi, and sent him to a yeshiva. Later, he learned French, German, and Russian.
Reading the Hebrew-language newspaper HaShahar, he became acquainted with the early movement of Zionism and concluded that the revival of the Hebrew language in the Land of Israel could unite all Jews worldwide. Hence why Hebrew is the official language of the State of Israel, the only Canaanite language still spoken today, and serves as the one truly successful example of a dead language that has been revived.
95.
The Hebrew Bible does not use the term “Hebrew” in reference to the Hebrew people’s language; its later historiography, in the Book of Kings, refers to it as yehudit — the Jewish language.
96.
Hebrew ceased to be a regular spoken language sometime between 200 and 400 CE, declining in the aftermath of the unsuccessful Bar Kokhba revolt (or the “Jewish Expedition” as the Romans named it) that was carried out against the Roman Empire by the Jews of Judaea.63
As well as leading the revolt, Simon bar Kokhba was regarded by many Jews as the Messiah who would restore their national independence.64 The Talmud, for instance, refers to Bar Kokhba as “Ben-Kusiba,” a derogatory term meaning “son of deception,” used to indicate that he was a false Messiah.
According to Cassius Dio, 580,000 Jews perished in the war, many more died of hunger and disease, and 50 fortresses and 985 villages were destroyed.65 However, the Jewish population remained strong in Galilee; Golan; Bet Shean Valley; and the eastern, southern, and western edges of Judea.66
The Bar Kokhba revolt greatly influenced the course of Jewish history and the philosophy of the Jewish religion. The Romans barred Jews from Jerusalem, except for attendance during the Jewish holiday of Tisha B’Av. And Jewish messianism was abstracted and spiritualized, while rabbinical political thought became deeply cautious and conservative.
97.
According to Rabbi Dr. Simcha Feuerman, the Hebrew language does not contain the word “fail.” Lehikashel, which is commonly used to mean “to fail,” actually means “to stumble.”
98.
The name Hebrew is believed to be based on the Semitic root ʕ-b-r (עבר) meaning “beyond,” “other side,” or “across.”67 Interpretations of the term Hebrew generally render its meaning as roughly “from the other side [of the river/desert]” — i.e., an exonym for the inhabitants of the land of Israel and Judah, perhaps from the perspective of Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, or Transjordan (with the river referred to being perhaps the Euphrates, Jordan or Litani; or maybe the northern Arabian Desert between Babylonia and Canaan).68
99.
The translation of the word Israel is “to struggle with God” or “to wrestle with God.” Jews are not asked to accept complete faith blindly, but rather we are encouraged intellectually to encounter God within ourselves after studying the struggles and wrestling our sages encountered in their journeys to God. It is possible to be a “good Jew” and have questions about God. In Judaism, actions are more important than faith.69
100.
The word “abracadabra” originated from Aramaic, the basis of Hebrew, meaning: “I create as I speak.”
101.
“Only the Hebrew language links us to the past, present, and future of the Jewish people, and to a specific land. No other language — and Jews have spoken many Jewish languages throughout our history — bonds us to the soul of our history, textual tradition, people and the land of Israel than Hebrew does.” — Rabbi Mitchel Malkus
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