Search Results (48)

Ritual has long served as a central axis of religious life, not only structuring practice but also transmitting meaning across generations. This article offers a new perspective on how Hasidic thought reconfigures the medieval Jewish genre of ta‘amei ha-mitzvot—meanings for the commandments—by transforming halakhah into a sustained mnemonic system for theological transmission and communal continuity. Focusing on Rabbi Nathan Sternhartz’s Likkutei Halakhot, a 19th-century Hasidic commentary on the Shulḥan Arukh, the study explores how Bratslav Hasidism embeds the kabbalistic teachings of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav within the legal framework of Jewish ritual practice. It argues that Rabbi Nathan developed a distinctive mnemonic strategy that integrates symbolic and theological meaning into halakhic detail, enabling the internalization of Bratslav theology through repeated ritual action. Through close textual analysis, historical contextualization, cognitive theory, and a case study of Kiddushin rituals, this article demonstrates how halakhah becomes not only a vehicle for theological cognition but also a mechanism for sustaining religious identity and memory within a post-charismatic Hasidic community. More broadly, the study contributes to discussions of ritual, memory, and symbolic reasoning in religious life. Full article

This article examines the interplay between Jewish and Muslim identities in German public discourse, focusing on their roles as placeholders in constructing contemporary German identity. It argues that discussions of Judaism, antisemitism, and the Israel–Palestine conflict often serve as projection surfaces for national self-perception, neglecting the complexities of Jewish and Muslim lived realities. Drawing on critiques by Elad Lapidot and Jean-Claude Milner, the article explores how the exclusion of heteronomous identities—grounded in divine law—exposes the structural limitations of modern liberal societies. It highlights the substitution of traditional Jewish identity with a liberal-compatible version in German discourse, while simultaneously framing Muslims as the “new Other”. This text calls for Jewish and Muslim communities to challenge the narratives that marginalize and instrumentalize them, advocating for solidarity to address shared challenges and enrich pluralistic democratic frameworks. Full article

(1) Background: Toothbrushing behavior in children and adolescents is shaped by national dental health policies and sociodemographic and psychological factors. In 2010, child dental care was incorporated into Israel’s National Health Insurance Law (NHIL). This study explored toothbrushing behavior and its predictors before and after this reform. (2) Methods: Data from 36,755 students in grades 6–10 were analyzed from the Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children study conducted pre-reform (1998, 2002, 2006) and post-reform (2010, 2013, 2016). The dependent variable was toothbrushing behavior, while the independent variables included sociodemographic and psychological characteristics. Chi-squared tests compared proportions of compliant toothbrushing behaviors, and logistic regression identified significant predictors. (3) Results: According to recommendations, 59–64% of children brushed their teeth before the reform. This proportion increased significantly post-reform, reaching 73% in 2018. Predictors of compliance included being female, younger, Jewish, and non-observant, having a higher socioeconomic status, and having a better psychological status. These predictors were consistent in pre- and post-reform regression models. (4) Conclusions: The dental care reform positively influenced toothbrushing habits among children and adolescents. However, disparities remain among specific communities. Interventions tailored to address sociodemographic and psychological factors are recommended to enhance regular toothbrushing habits across all populations. Full article

Several statements in Paul’s letters have led scholars to conclude that Paul was not Law-observant and that he was at best indifferent, if not antagonistic, to Jewish Law-observance. This article challenges these views by situating supposedly “negative” statements on the Law within Paul’s discourse on justification (Gal 2) and freedom from the Law of sin and death (Rom 7), and argues that aspects of 1 Cor 7, Gal 2–3, and Rom 3–4 imply Paul expected even believing Jews to remain Law-observant. Full article

This article explores the complex issue of disharmony within religious marriages, focusing on Jewish approaches to divorce. Contrasting Jewish divorce mediation with other religions’ approaches to marital conflict, this article examines two Judaic models: one viewing divorce as a severe remedy permissible only under certain circumstances, and the other allowing for divorce when a marriage is irreparably broken. The author highlights the positive Jewish commandment to peacefully divorce, discussing how mediation integrates compassion and justice, in line with Jewish legal and ethical traditions. This work emphasizes the benefits of community-based divorce mediation, including lower costs, shorter timelines, and increased communal acceptance. Jewish divorce mediation, the author argues, is particularly effective in maintaining child-centeredness and co-parenting relationships post-divorce. This article calls for a broader adoption of Jewish divorce mediation through charitable organizations to effectuate Jewish family values and provide amicable resolutions within the Jewish community. Full article

In Romans 5, Paul says that prior to law “sin is not counted” (v. 13), and that upon law’s arrival, “the trespass increased” (v. 20). For most interpreters, the law that counted sin and increased the trespass is the law that God revealed to Israel at Sinai. Origen of Alexandria offered significant exegetical objections to this reading and proposed that natural law is in view. I modify Origen’s proposal to align Paul with the early Jewish tradition of Adam’s law, and I argue that “law” in vv. 13a and 20 refers to law’s arrival to Adam. Romans 5:12–21 is Paul’s re-telling of Scripture and chronicles Sin and Death achieving their global reigns. Understood this way, vv. 12–14 and 20–21 tell us what transpired when God’s law came to Adam: Sin and Death united, and they launched and secured their cosmic tyranny. This is Sin and Death’s origin story. Full article

Ḥizzuq ʾEmunah (Faith Strengthened), written by the 16th-century Karaite Jewish scholar Isaac ben Abraham of Troki (Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth), was one of the most renowned Hebrew anti-Christian polemical works, meriting translation into most European languages. Troki authored his book during the Polish Reformation, a period marked by intense interactions and theological debates between Jews and Christians of various denominations. The author provides a comprehensive philological, grammatical, and historical analysis of the New Testament while relying heavily on the ideas and scriptural interpretations of radical Protestant theologians and Rabbanite scholars. Ḥizzuq ʾEmunah is unusual in a number of respects. This paper examines one such peculiarity—namely, the author’s view that the Torah and its commandments obligate Christians—as well as his eschatological model in which Christians will become part of Israel in the messianic age. His perspective is examined in our study with particular attention to the range of argumentative methods employed. Among these are the use of evidence from the New Testament, especially the accounts of Jesus and his disciples observing the commandments, and the contrast of early Christians’ conceptions and practices, which he views as close to the Mosaic law, with later Christian interpretations of the Old and the New Testament. Full article

Judaism was not Paul’s background, but his context, and much of his gospel’s content. Modern Pauline Studies, however, often see Paul’s mission as an expression of what he found wrong with Judaism, a Judaism that supposedly discouraged relations with Gentiles. This essay investigates all the various ways that Jews and Gentiles comfortably cohabited the Graeco-Roman Diaspora. What spurred Paul’s mission was not a critique of an ethnically exclusive Judaism, but his conviction that, in Christ, the end times had arrived. Accordingly, he taught that Gentiles should repudiate their own gods and commit exclusively to the worship of Israel’s god. Paul’s contest was not with Jewish law. It was with pagan gods. Both his mission and his message place him firmly within the pluriform Judaism of his time, a Judaism that took its place within the god-congested world of first-century Mediterranean paganism. Full article

This essay focuses on the reception of Pauline ideas in the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies, commonly dated to the early fourth century. At first, the claim that the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies contain Pauline ideas may seem surprising, since the Homilies are commonly considered “Jewish Christian” and thus anti-Pauline. However, new readings of Paul generated by the “Paul within Judaism” perspective, along with new insights on the Homilies, reveal that the latter work seems to contain Pauline ideas not preserved in other receptions of Paul. The Homilies share with Paul the following traits and ideas: (1) like Paul, the Homilies distinguish between Jews and non-Jews (the term “Christian” never appears) and, like Paul, the Homilies’ teachings about law address gentiles and prescribe a kind of Judaism for them; (2) gentiles must adapt to a Jewish lifestyle and keep the commandments that the Torah prescribes for non-Israelites; (3) Jews and Jesus-oriented gentiles together make up the people of God (called theosebeis in the Homilies), but the distinction between them remains. They have equal status in the eyes of God but differences in their observance of the law remain. An important point where the Homilies deviate from Paul is their insistence that Jews do not necessarily need Jesus. For the Homilies, Jesus is primarily the teacher of gentiles, and they envision two parallel paths to salvation: Moses for Jews and Jesus for gentiles. This essay suggests that the Homilies’ understanding of ideas that we recognize as Pauline developed in a milieu marked by the presence of non-Jesus-oriented (rabbinic) Jews. Full article

This paper argues for proximity between the two branches of a jurisprudential–adjudicative genre: manuals for judges or the etiquette for the judgeship. I wish to demonstrate that the proximity, lexicography, ways and tools of argument, etc., are founded upon a meta-legal stratum that contains kalam theology. In this paper, I will elaborate on the genre and its discovery, define some basic principles for the field of discussion, and provide textual examples of the proximities between the two branches of the genre based on pre-legal or meta-halachic demands. I suggest a preliminary result here and lay the groundwork for further research in the future: The criteria for the appointment of the true judge sketch out his idealized personality. He is more than an administrator of the judicial bureaucracy: he is a guide for the legally perplexed peoplehood, both in Judaism and Islam. Full article

This article traces the emergence of what is nowadays called “postsecular” religion from German-Jewish philosophy of the 1920s and 1930s. The three different cases of Franz Rosenzweig, Alexander Altmann, and Leo Strauss impel us to pay particular attention to a few recurring argumentative and rhetorical strategies. The emergence of postsecularism marks a shift in the epistemic foundations of Jewish religious thought, which had long been under pressure from secular European thought. Beginning with Rosenzweig, Jewish philosophy used secular categories of European philosophy to facilitate a return to the foundations of Judaism, eventually turning against what it sees as the epistemic weaknesses of secularism itself. This article traces the new phenomenon to Rosenzweig’s evolving view of secularism, especially to his ridicule of Siegfried Kracauer’s secular messianism, before examining a few key arguments in his book The Star of Redemption (1921). A brief discussion of Alexander Altmann’s writings of the early 1930s provides that even modern Orthodox Jewish thought, which had never been “secular”, used postsecular categories and arguments to make the philosophical case for orthodoxy. Leo Strauss’s introduction to his Philosophy and Law (1935) provides a far more elaborated form of Rosenzweig’s argument. As this article seeks to show, postsecular Jewish thought comes with a slight twist of epistemic relativism, particularly when it comes to the juxtaposition of the Biblical and scientific “world-views”. But here it merely draws the full consequences of modern science, beating scientism with its own weapons. Furthermore, religious thought in the 20th century had no other option than to rebuild itself on postsecular grounds. Full article

The essay outlines a four-phase triage process made by a fictive Talmudic rabbi working on an equally fictive hospital COVID-19 ward. The rabbi bases his decision on four different Talmudic texts, proceeding one by one, with each text building on the preceding one, until he is ready to allocate his scarce medical resources to one of the patients, thus being forced to deny them to others. Along the way, the paper will examine how this Talmudic reasoning can also be applied to the patient, or even a potential patient, clarifying the demands of the individual’s ethical responsibility to avoid triage situations in the first place through social distancing and even more so through getting vaccinated. The paper argues that the rabbi has a number of Talmudic tools at hand that make his decision easier, not because he strictly follows Jewish law, but because of the rich experience standing behind Jewish legal traditions, making a universally valid ethical justification of difficult decisions possible. The essay proposes that including such theological material in triage guidelines would help make those decisions more acceptable in the long run, especially for societies in which religious traditions still play a certain role in the cultural consciousness. Full article

Anyone who traces their Jewish ancestors back to the 18th century and even further back in history encounters the challenge of looking for ancestry without the clue that a fixed family name provides. Before the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, when Jews were forced by law to adopt a fixed family name, Ashkenazim Jewish families used patronymic names as last names. A patronymic name changes every generation. Sometimes, in larger cities, various types of nicknames were used as last names. Such a nickname could change within a generation and often indicated the place a person came from, his occupation, or personal characteristics. In this article, I will show, using three case studies, how I have faced the challenge of determining which patronymic names and nicknames my ancestors used as last names before they were forced to adopt a fixed family name. The three case studies are the ancestors of Josef Stern, who lived in the late 18th and early 19th century in Neu Bistritz in southern Bohemia, today Nova Bystrice in Czechia; Julius Strauss, 1883–1939, who lived in the late 18th, 19th, and early 20th century in Frücht and Giessen in Nassau/Hesse, today in southern Germany; and Simon Reiniger, who lived in Prague in the 18th and early 19th century. Full article

In many churches nowadays, there has been a standardized approach to premarital counseling for couples involving social, pastoral, and psychological perspectives. In contrast, many rabbis and other Jewish officials still concentrate on legal aspects alone. The need for resolving important issues on the verge of wedlock is too often left to secular experts in law, psychology, or counseling. However, in recent years, this lack of formal training for marriage preparation has also been acknowledged by the Jewish clergy in order to incorporate it in the preparatory period before the bond is tied. This case study focuses on Jewish and Roman Catholic conceptions of marriage, past and present. We intend to do a comparative analysis of the prerequisites of religious marriage based on the assumption that both Judaism and the Roman Catholic Church have a distinct legal framework to assess marriage preparation. Full article

Background: Working children and adolescents face a heightened risk of work-related injuries. This research aimed to assess the rate of hospitalizations resulting from work-related injuries among children and adolescents in Israel, with a specific focus on disadvantaged populations. Methods: This nationwide retrospective cohort study utilized The Israeli National Trauma Registry (INTR). It included 642 children and adolescents aged 13–17 hospitalized due to work-related injuries from 2015–2022. Results: Arab children had over five times the risk of hospitalization due to work-related injuries compared to Jewish (RR = 5.5, 95% CI: 4.7–7.4). Despite the 2018 law prohibiting young people from entering this type of work, the most common type of work leading to hospitalization was construction, accounting for 40.2% of Arab and 11.9% of Jewish injuries (p < 0.001). After adjustment, road traffic accidents and falls presented the highest odds of at least severe injury. Arabs had three times significantly higher odds of at least moderate injury compared to Jews. Conclusions: Prioritizing the creation of safe job opportunities for Arab teenagers is imperative. Strict enforcement measures, particularly within the construction industry, especially among Arab youth and during night shifts, are essential. These initiatives should focus on establishing secure and sustainable employment opportunities for children and young individuals, effectively reducing the risks associated with hazardous labor practices. In addition, the implementation of educational programs in the school curriculum covering essential aspects of youth employment is vital. Full article