Min haMuvhar

Rabbi Hayyim Angel will be giving various shiurim/lectures during the coming weeks, many accessible via Zoom.

Haredi religious leaders in Israel believe that yeshiva students should be exempt from military service. Rabbi Alan Yuter discusses the halakhic--and practical--rejections to that approach.

Rabbi Hayyim Angel made a podcast on the Haftarah for Korah with Dr. Yosefa Wruble of Matan in Israel.

Here is the link to the podcast:

Ten spies return with a demoralizing report, the nation loses faith, and God decrees that the generation of the wilderness will perish before entering the land. In the plain sense of Numbers, the sin lies in the people’s faithlessness and despair after hearing the spies’ report. However, the Book of Deuteronomy dramatically complicates this picture.

The approach of the ten spies is still espoused by many today. But just as their error caused massive suffering to the people then, it can cause serious harm to us today. We need to hear the courageous and faithful voices of Caleb and Joshua. Reality is difficult; escapism is far worse.

Judaism does not ask us to abandon our particular commitments in the name of a universal humanity. Rather, it teaches us to see that the God who calls us into covenant is also the creator of those who stand outside that covenant.

Francis Idris offers a significant review of Rabbi Marc D. Angel's book, Maimonides, Spinoza and Us, Toward an Intellectually Vibrant Judaism.

Conversations, the journal of the Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals, asked Rabbi Zev Eleff to address four questions about the state of Modern Orthodoxy.

Kohelet 1–3 sets the tone for a book that never settles for easy answers. In the
face of toil, impermanence, and uncertainty, Kohelet urges not despair, but
attentiveness—to fleeting joy, to moral humility, and to the awe of God that arises from
honest limitation.