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Hande Gençünal

Oct 19, 2026, 7:41 PM

On the withdrawal of the Infinite and the space that love leaves behind When you set a compass on a sheet of paper, the sharp point goes in first. The circle comes later. Yet the whole measure of the circle,...

Bruce D. Forman

Oct 16, 2026, 11:54 PM

The Death Penalty: What Judaism Knows About Justice and the Power of Restraint

The recent controversy surrounding the suggestion of a public execution of Nidal Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist convicted of murdering 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, has renewed interest in capital punishment. The Trump administration’s proposal to livestream...

Hande Gençünal

Oct 16, 2026, 8:51 AM

On the smallest letter and the whole that a broken thing remembers Whatever letter a scribe is about to write, the pen first touches the parchment as a single dot. That dot grows, stretches, bends, and becomes an alef, a...

Hande Gençünal

Oct 14, 2026, 4:57 AM

What If It Wasn’t a Coincidence?

Jung, Esther and the meaning of coincidence In Carl Gustav Jung's consulting room, a young woman was describing a dream from the night before. Someone had given her a piece of jewelry shaped like a golden scarab, the beetle revered...

Hande Gençünal

Oct 11, 2026, 5:51 PM

The Face That Does Not Hide

On Birkat Kohanim, the gaze and being seen When Birkat Kohanim is recited in the Kal, as the Jews of Turkey call their house of prayer, in many communities the kohanim draw their tallitot over their heads, raise their hands...

Hande Gençünal

Oct 7, 2026, 11:27 PM

The Space Between the Wings

On desire, distance and tzimtzum In the innermost room of the Mishkan, on the golden cover of the Ark, stand two cherubim. Their faces turn toward each other, their wings spread upward, and between them a space is left open....

Sam Lehman-Wilzig

Oct 2, 2026, 6:53 AM

Bible vs. Talmud: The Irony of Haredi “Torah” Study

The cycle of Torah reading ends and begins again tomorrow on Simkhat Torah (in Israel; on Sunday, overseas). But what exactly is meant by “Torah”? It depends on who you ask. And the (very surprising) answer holds within it...

Oct 1, 2026, 10:57 PM

When the Sukkah Becomes a TARDIS

On AI, Moral Purity, and What We Do With Powerful Tools It all started when my friend Rabbi David Seidenberg made a post comparing the sukkah to the TARDIS. Attached to the post he included an image of a TARDIS-sukkah that...

Hande Gençünal

Sep 27, 2026, 11:04 PM

The Name Written in the Body

In a podcast I watched recently, the following words distilled one of the most profound themes of Kabbalah into a few sentences. "The human body is a representation of God's name. The essential name of God is Yud and Hei...

Hande Gençünal

Sep 26, 2026, 10:07 PM

A House With One Side Always Left Open on Sukkot

Where I live, unfortunately, building a sukkah simply isn't possible. But I came to understand, later than I would have liked, that this impossibility doesn't mean I can never step beneath that fragile roof, because certain houses can be...

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