Tanakh

Shlomo Zuckier asks what we can learn from Shaul's mistakes in this week's Haftara.

Laurance Wieder's After Adam was named the Book of the Year in 2019 by First Thing's John Wilson, but has been largely overlooked in the Jewish community. The Jewish Review of Book's Michal Leibowitz seeks to remedy this in her review of Wieder's lyrical retelling of the Bible.

Miriam Gedwiser explains how the Rabbis of the Talmud put the law of yefat to'ar in conversation with the David narrative, and what this teaches us about how we should approach passages of this nature.

Yehuda Goldberg explains how the Bible's depictions of the Tower of Babel and of Jerusalem teaches us about the risk and potential of cities.

Lawrence Kaplan responds to AJ Berkovitz’s article on the many conflicting interpretations of a passage in Midrash Tehillim, highlighting two different approaches advanced by Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik.

In a chapter adapted from his new book, Be, Become, Bless: Jewish Spirituality between East and West, Yaakov Nagen suggests based on the Zohar that the world endures when we see Godliness in another person's face.

Ezra Sivan probes the Sabbath and the Torah's call to love God.

Daniel Berkove shows how parallels between the building of the Tabernacle and the building of Pharaoh's storage cities shed light on the differences between civilizations that those structures represent.

In advance of Shavuot, Stuart Halpern reviews Reading Ruth, a succinct but poignant new literary commentary on the Book of Ruth, by Leon Kass and his granddaughter Hannah Mandelbaum.

A poem on parshat Korach by Zohar Atkins