Open Search form

Theology

Apply for a Blog

Oct 15, 2026, 2:34 AM

Five Years of Blogging: Parashat Noah, From the Flood to the Work of Repair

This is my fifth-year writing about parashat Noah. I began blogging in 2022, in the midst of COVID, when writing became a form of escape. But with parashat Noah, something changed: I began writing every week, without fail. Each...

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...

Allen S. Maller

Oct 13, 2026, 4:56 AM

A COMMANDMENT AGAINST RELIGIOUS EXTREMISM

I am sure most religious people shudder when they hear terrorists who are religious fanatics using Scripture to support their violent actions. For several years I sought texts that condemn extremism and the arrogant assertion of personal judgment. I...

Oct 9, 2026, 6:31 AM

What “A House of Prayer for All Nations” Does Not Mean

Image generated using AI

Isaiah 56:7 invites people to serve Hashem. It does not invite anyone, Jew or gentile, to bring a service of their own up the mountain. The sentence you were handed You may have heard that the day has a simple shape....

Allen S. Maller

Oct 7, 2026, 5:19 PM

Choosing To Be Chosen To Become Jewish

Christianity and Islam are religious communities. Judaism (Hebrews Genesis 14:13) however is more than just a religious community. The Hebrew Bible is filled with secular national Jewish history and political desire to make future Jews into ongoing independence and...

Oct 7, 2026, 2:54 PM

A Political Reading of Parashat Bereshit

Leadership is tested not when decisions succeed, but when they fail. Three years after the catastrophe of October 7th, an urgent political question remains unanswered: Who is responsible for the failure that allowed the massacre to happen? The Israeli...

Oct 6, 2026, 3:34 PM

The Heavens Belong to God: May a Jew Leave Earth?

Apollo 8 Flight Plan, Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-apollo-8-delivered-moment-christmas-eve-peace-and-understanding-world-180976431/
Overlaid with astronaut:, stock photography licensed via Canva

Early Space exploration precipitated an interest in how Jewish law might be kept beyond the confines of planet Earth. Before asking how Halakha could be observed in Space, we need to return to an earlier question: whether humans may...

Allen S. Maller

Oct 5, 2026, 11:25 PM

99 Names Of Allah and 70 Aspects Of YHVH God

Islam's 99 Names traditionally emphasizes Allah’s 99 beautiful names to help humans understand and relate to the one and only God. Judaism's one Name centers on the four-letter tetragrammaton (YHVH), which represents God's ongoing dynamic presence that became too holy...

Allen S. Maller

Oct 4, 2026, 12:26 PM

Extrasolar Planets With Life Forms Soon

Galaxies are enormous and hold hundreds of billions of stars. These stars form from cold, dense gas. Indeed, every large galaxy, including the Milky Way, is wrapped in a huge envelope of gas called the circumgalactic medium, or CGM....

Allen S. Maller

Oct 2, 2026, 8:31 AM

Islam’s 99 Names of Allah, and Judaism’s One Sacred Name of YHVH

Islam's 99 names of Allah, and Judaism's 70 sacred names of God share deep linguistic, historical, and spiritual connections. We have Shared Semitic Roots: Arabic and Hebrew are sister languages. Divine attributes in the Qur'an and the Hebrew Bible...

Load more