Tanakh

Ayelet Wenger weaves together the personal, historical and exegetical in advance of reading Sefer Shemot.

Ben Greenfield examines the curious parallels between the stories of Moshe in the ark and the splitting of the sea.

Rena Kosowsky compares the treatment of sexual assault in the Bible and the Talmud, and explores the implications of what that means for how we should address it today.

Zvi Grumet suggests that when read in sequence, the kinot of R. Elazar Ha-Kalir—often seen as the ones most difficult to understand—offer a powerful theological narrative from despair to hope.

Why did the women bring musical instruments out of Egypt? In her first Lehrhaus article, musicologist Rebecca Cypess draws a fascinating historical analogy between biblical and African-American slavery to shed light on the Exodus in Jewish tradition.

In time for Tisha Be-Av, Marc Eichenbaum offers a meaningful new reading of Eikha using modern psychological concepts like grief, trauma, and narrative construction.

Mark Glass puts the Akeidah in conversation with the surrounding narratives of the book of Genesis.

Sholom Eisenstat presents a passage of the Zohar about the inverted nuns in Parashat Beha'alotekha to explore the interplay between design and interpretation of the Torah.

Zohar Atkins presents a new poem on the Akeidah.

How was the original Seder experienced, and how do we constitute a Jewish collective? Joel Levy and Leon Wiener-Dow argue that the collective must begin with the independent-minded individual.