Shavuot

How do Moses Mendelssohn and Revelation jibe? Judah Kerbel offers some perspective.

Jerome Marcus explores understandings of freedom within halakhah and how they relate to Pesah and Shavuot

Through a nuanced examination of interrelated minhagim, Nachman Levine shows how the custom of eating dairy foods, particularly blintzes, on Shavuot reenacts a collective initiation into Torah Study, allowing us to reexperience Revelation.

Abe Mezrich presents a poem on the Book of Ruth.

Whose idea was Sinai? A midrash contends that Sinai was first conceived by Jethro. Ezra Zuckerman Sivan supports this Midrash from the Torah's text, and explains why Jethro was the appropriate vehicle for providing the rationale of Sinai.

  Josh Cahan   Pesikta de-Rav Kahana 12:11R. Lazar said: Like a king who wished to marry a well-born noblewoman, and said, “I will not wed her...

The biblical account of the holiday we refer to as Shavuot bears no relationship at all to the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. The emergence of the association between this harvest festival and the Sinai covenant has therefore occupied both traditional and academic thinkers for centuries. Tzvika Aviv argues for a previously unexplored approach to the question, one which bridges the mystical insights of the Zohar with current scientific knowledge regarding wheat genetics.

One of the central concerns of the work of Rav Shagar is translation, in both its literal and figurative versions. Michael Blank explores Rav Shagar's use and conception of translation by examining the way he puts the writings of Rebbe Nachman, Jacque Lacan, and Emmanuel Levinas in conversation.