Jeremy England, at The Blogs

Nov 26, 2023, 7:38 AM

The Unmagical Temple: Erasing Amalek’s Remembrance

The Torah clearly commands the Israelites to "wipe out the memory of Amalek" but what does "memory" (zekher) mean here? Surely it cannot be the case that the point is to lose all ability to remember who or what...

Nov 19, 2023, 10:59 PM

The Unmagical Temple: Defeating Amalek

The Torah provides detailed advice on how to defeat Amalek during the first mention of the enemy nation in Chapter 17 of the Book of Exodus: 9 And Moses said unto Joshua: 'Choose us out men, and go out, fight...

Nov 8, 2023, 6:40 PM

The Unmagical Temple: Amalek and the Serpent

Genesis introduces the idea of disobeying God through a serpent because – like the snake’s fangs snapping at you as you hold its tail – the punishing long-term consequences of transgressing the divine command are highly difficult to predict...

Jun 19, 2022, 7:22 AM

The Unmagical Temple: A Restaurant

One way you can tell how alienating advanced, capitalist, Western societies are is to look at the kinds of eating experiences people crave and are willing to pay for. Ultra-expensive, fancy restaurants advertise how carefully they source their ingredients based...

May 27, 2022, 10:46 AM

The Unmagical Temple: A City

There is no way of understanding the practical impact that the mikdash (temple) is meant to have on the economic and social order of a Judaic society without considering it in the context of Jerusalem, the city within which...

May 19, 2022, 7:30 AM

The Unmagical Temple: Gathering

People like to gather. We do so for all sorts of purposes – sporting events, concerts, arts festivals, farmers’ markets etc. – and in each of these cases, part of what we get out of it has nothing to do...

May 8, 2022, 4:39 PM

The Unmagical Temple: Azure Strings

Why is tkhelet (azure) the key to everything else when it comes to bringing the Torah back to its full life? Of course the story of tkhelet is inspiring: the rabbinic knowledge regarding which mollusk this dye for priestly...

May 2, 2022, 12:56 AM

The Unmagical Temple

The Hebrew Bible and Talmud often describe events fantastically: from splitting seas to talking serpents, we get used to the idea that these accounts are not constrained by what we might call the rules of everyday life. This way...

About Me

Jeremy England is physicist, biologist, and machine learning researcher who also has received ordination as an orthodox rabbi. Previously a physics professor at MIT, he now resides in Israel and loves exploring the Torah’s commentaries on scientific reasoning.