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Joseph C. Kaplan

Oct 16, 2026, 10:05 AM

Name-dropping Connections

I really don’t know where to start this column: From Far Rockaway? Teaneck? Gush Etzion? The Upper West Side? Jerusalem? Toronto? All are possibilities, though whichever I choose, I’m afraid that you’ll have to — as we used to...

Oct 13, 2026, 7:59 AM

Seeing Red: Hubris and the Halakha of Space Flight

Rabbi Nachum Eliezer Rabinovitch, photo: Nadav Efrati / Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Nahum_Eliezer_Rabinovitch

Vladimir Menshikov, Boga Nyet! [There is no God!], 1975. State Museum of the History of Religion in Saint Petersburg. Scaled-down, low-resolution image permitted under fair use clause, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:%D0%91%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%B0_%D0%BD%D0%B5%D1%82_1975.jpg

In 1961, as humans reached Space, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson of Lubavitch (1902-1994) wrote a private letter in which he declared that Space travel was permitted according to Jewish law. The Lubavitcher Rebbe offered a broad, affirmative framework for...

Michael Feldstein

Oct 13, 2026, 4:56 AM

YCT at 25: An Interview with Rabbi Benjamin Berger

This year, Yeshivat Chovevei Torah (YCT) is celebrating its 25th anniversary year, and it recently hired Rabbi Benjamin Berger—himself a graduate of YCT—as its new president. I had the opportunity to ask Rabbi Berger about the yeshiva’s past accomplishments, some...

Gershon Blumstein

Oct 11, 2026, 5:38 PM

What Judaism Teaches About Loss and Hope

There are moments in life when we lose more than what happened. We lose what we believed would happen next. A marriage ends, and we lose not only the person but the years we imagined growing old together. A diagnosis changes...

Gershon Blumstein

Oct 10, 2026, 1:39 AM

When the Heart Breaks

What Judaism Teaches Us About the Future We Thought We Had Heartbreak takes more than a person from our lives. It takes a future. There is the conversation you thought you would have next week, the journey you imagined taking together, the...

Gershon Blumstein

Oct 4, 2026, 6:10 PM

The Judaism That Lets Us Become

What We Inherit, What We Change, and What We Give Forward I have carried a question for most of my life, though I did not always know I was carrying it. What does it mean to inherit Judaism? For years, I believed...

Shira Pasternak Be'eri

Oct 2, 2026, 10:25 AM

Simchat Torah: Where there’s change, I find hope

Image by the author and her AI friends

Dancing with the Torah was once a hard sell for many Orthodox women, but it's the default for the next generation in my shul – a quiet revolution on the women's side

Sep 20, 2026, 5:20 PM

Echoes of the Past, Rituals of the Future

It was the morning before Yom Kippur and I hadn't done tashlich yet, but there was another errand involving a trip to nature on my checklist; I needed to deposit some bones. The idea of making a pilgrimage to the...

Eliezer Avraham

Sep 20, 2026, 8:47 AM

October 7: The Courage That Rises When the World Falls

AI generated illustration

An exploration of faith, identity, and the quiet resolve that emerged in the aftermath When the World Became Unrecognizable There are moments in Jewish history when the ground beneath us gives way, when the moral order collapses in an instant....

Sep 18, 2026, 8:32 PM

The Problem Isn’t Playing Ball on Shabbat

In a recent article, an author shared how children can “upgrade their kdeushas Shabbos” by not playing ball or riding on scooters. In other words, they can improve the way they sanctify Shabbat by refraining from these activities. He...

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