edJEWcation

This episode starts off with a murder on a Tel Aviv beach, how that murder would fundamentally change the future of the Zionist movement, Jabotinsky’s role within it. In this episode, we get into: Why Jabotinsky wrote “The Iron Wall” and how it set him at odds with the Zionist establishment Development of various aspects of his philosophy from Betar to Hadar to Monism The “fascist” smear and the p...

Hashem offers a 12-year-old king anything he wants. Wealth, power, conquest, all on the table. Solomon asks for wisdom, and nearly three thousand years later we’re still reading what he did with it. This week we discuss the Book of Proverbs, Solomon’s advice to his kids, and find that a lot of it reads like a group text to modern America. But first, a mazel tov: ChayaLeah’s other show, Ask a Jew,...

Picking up where we left him last time…Jabotinsky is in a refugee camp in Egypt with 12,000 Jewish refugees, who had been expelled from Palestine by the Turks. He surveys the camp, the Jews within it and comes out with one conclusion: pity won’t build a nation, soldiers will. What follows are the three of the loneliest years of his life, followed spending time in a British prison for the crime of...

In this episode we discuss Compulsory service vs. a Second Temple style tax to Jerusalem, and why the Law of Return covers even Noam Chomsky Israelis flying home to vote, and the rabbis who spend Yom Kippur bashing Israel The Rabbi’s rules for when to confront someone and when to keep your mouth closed (hint: it’s called wisdom) A grandmother’s edible sukkah, magicians and moon bounces in shul, an...

Ze’ev Jabotinsky could have been a great Russian novelist. Everyone, including the Russian novelists, said so. Instead, a spring evening in Odessa in 1903 set him on the hardest road available to a Jew in the Russian Empire, and he never got off it. This week Jay goes solo for the first episode in a four part series about Jabotinsky’s life. In first episode of the series, we get into: What growing...

The Rabbi’s Ten Days of Repentance began with a bowl of cornflakes topped with rancid milk, which somehow leads to him doing shots of Gin on Simchas Torah…with an MIT fraternity. Once we helped him process the milk tragedy, we get into our real discussion. We talk about: Is it American-Jew or Jewish-American? And what two thousand years of never quite belonging has to do with it. Why Jewish emanci...

In honor of Yom Kippur, we talk about two kinds of sins we commit. Sins of omissionand sins of commission. Sins of omission are the things we should have done and didn’t, and almost nobody puts those on their list of things to repent for because, well, we may not have known we committed them. Sins of commission are the things we were aware did: the thing we said, the thing we took, the person we h...

Jay has been doing some reading, and he opens this week with an essay he refuses to attribute until the Rabbi guesses. From there the Rabbi gets on a roll about Mark Ruffalo, Javier Bardem, and Hasan Piker (he calls him something else), and why the four in ten Jewish college students pulling back from Jewish life are a bigger threat than any of them. Then we hit the holidays, because Rosh Hashanah...

Jonah gets swallowed by a fish, and that is the part everybody remembers, but the real story is what happens after: Nineveh repents, Hashem forgives, and Jonah sits down under a plant and sulks about it. In this episode, we get into: The kikayon, the plant that grows over Jonah and dies overnight, and the question God closes the book with about 120,000 people Why justice and mercy are not opposite...

Some weeks we pick the topics. This week you picked them for us. The Rabbi opens by informing both of us that the frivolity is over, because Elul has arrived and we have thirty days to get our act together before Rosh Hashanah. Also, he would like an apology for being cut out of last week’s episode (an apology is not forthcoming). Then ChayaLeah tells us about a 6 am Uber ride in Jackson Hole that...

It is just CL and I this week, because we wanted to give her a chance to speak this week (sorry, Rabbi). Her oldest son got engaged a few weeks ago, there has already been an engagement party in Crown Heights and a second one on the West Coast, and the wedding is coming fast. So we thought people would be interested: what actually goes into planning a Chabad Hasidic wedding? The answer starts with...

Moses has five weeks left. He starts talking on the first of Shevat, he dies on the seventh of Adar, and in between he delivers the longest, most repetitive, most urgent speech in the Torah. The traditional name for it is Mishneh Torah, the repetition of the Torah, and many commentators say this is the one book Moses spoke on his own behalf. So this week we skip the parsha by parsha treatment and...

Nobody warns you that the hardest parenting years might come after your kids are grown. We opened with a story Jay picked up in a Delta Lounge, a man quietly putting on tefillin who turned out to be a Soviet Jew that did not learn he was Jewish until his family reached America. That pulled us into the Rebbe and Soviet Jewry, quiet diplomacy versus loud demonstrations, and a father exiled to Kazakh...

Tisha B’Av is coming, and before we sit on the floor with the lights low, we’re doing our homework. This week we open the Book of Lamentations, the scroll Jeremiah wrote as Jerusalem fell (or was about to fall, depending on which commentators you ask). It’s a book with a wild backstory: a king who burned the first draft, a scribe named Baruch who took dictation for round two, and an alphabet-shape...

The Rabbi opens with a request: can we please put a moratorium on the word “anti-Semitism” until next July 4th? (Spoiler: no, but we try.) Then we celebrate some family news and dive into Matot-Masei, the double portion that closes out the book of Numbers. The Rabbi calls it one of the juiciest parshas of the year, and he makes his case: a war, an angry Moses, a real estate negotiation gone sidewa...

Some episodes start light. This one starts with a candle. We begin with Jay’s yahrzeit for his mom, twelve years gone and still deeply missed, and the Rabbi walks us through what the anniversary of a death really means in Jewish tradition. From there we widen out to a fast day heavy with history and a piece of tech that might change how any of us learns Torah. In this episode, we get into: What ya...

What makes two rabbis who disagreed about almost everything the most celebrated pair in Jewish history? This week we sit down with Hillel and Shammai, the original dynamic duo, and the answer turns out to be the way they argued, not what they argued about. In this episode, we get into: The lost art of disagreeing with someone you actually like and respect, and why Judaism treats a good argument as...

We made it to the finish line. After two earlier episodes, we wrap up the Twelve Prophets and tie a bow on them all. Along the way we get into why these texts barely show up in yeshiva, a much-debated Midrash about Adam and the animals, and whether religion or just plain ideology has driven the worst of human history. Then we go prophet by prophet, all the way to the very last words of prophecy. I...

We picked up where we left off with the Twelve Prophets (Trei Asar), and Hosea throws us straight into one of the strangest stories in all of the Tanakh. Gd is furious that the Jewish people are chasing idols, so He gives Hosea an unusual assignment: go marry a woman of ill repute, have kids with her, and name them “Not My People” and “No Mercy.” It’s harsh, it’s strange, and the Rabbi calls it th...

Let’s be honest: when someone you’re not a fan of gets bad news, there’s a tiny, guilty dopamine hit. We open this episode by confessing that impulse out loud and digging into what Pirkei Avot (and King Solomon) have to say about rejoicing at your enemy’s fall. Spoiler: it’s a whole thing. In this episode, we get into: The ethics of Schadenfreude and what Pirkei Avot teaches about resisting that g...

The rabbi’s out this week, so we’re are doing what any self-respecting book nerds would do: geeking out about reading. In this episode, we get into: Jay breaks down his “30 pages a day” habit (spoiler: it adds up to 10,000 pages a year) ChayaLeah confesses her Shakespeare regrets Jay’s system for building a daily reading habit (and why you should keep three books going at once) The “Chan-book-ah”...

What does it actually take to be a prophet? Spoiler: it’s not just hearing voices and shouting in the marketplace (though there’s some of that). In this kickoff to our new series on the Trei Asar, the Twelve Prophets of the Tanakh, we set the stage before diving into the individual books. Think of this as Prophecy 101 with a side of cult talk, because honestly, the line between “biblical prophet”...

King Solomon had a thousand wives, wrote a book of proverbs, and still felt the need to write a whole passionate love poem about a shepherd boy and a maiden. Coincidence? We think not. In this follow-up to our Valentine’s Day episode, we go deeper into what Judaism actually teaches about love, including what Song of Songs reveals about God’s relationship with the Jewish people, and we bring it all...

We’re kicking off a brand new segment called “Dear Rabbi,” where we bring real-life issues to the Rabbi and actually get into it with honest, often hilarious, sometimes painful conversations about the stuff people are quietly struggling with. First up: how to care for elderly parents without losing your mind, your marriage, or your lunch break. In this episode, we get into: Setting boundaries with...

We kicked off this month's Zoom talking about the Rebbe's birthday and why his legacy still hits so hard, from growing Chabad's global mission to his no-nonsense philosophy on turning obstacles into opportunities. Then we got into full Passover mode: ChayaLeah is prepping a community Seder for 120 people and her game plan is SPEED. We broke down the Ten Plagues (why those plagues, why...