The Schrift - Ancient Jewish Wisdom for Modern Times

Our culture has romanticized and trivialized the idea of "faith." Just have faith, man! You've got to have faith! It all comes down to faith. Yet, some people are able to take the famous "leap of faith" whereas others are not. Dostoevsky could take this existentialist leap of faith, whereas Kafka's Josef K. could never "let go" into the void. The Torah's words on choosing to follow the mitzvot may...

It took two world wars for European countries to realize that nationalism is a bit silly. Many other countries have yet to catch up. In his speech to the Israelites, Moshe shows how real nationalism comes from relentless questioning rather than blind obedience. When Hannah Arendt wrote that the Nazi mass murderer Adolf Eichmann was not a monster but just "a bureaucrat," she was following in the fo...

The Torah tells us not to "boil a baby cow in the milk of her mother." The Torah doesn't want us just to refrain from mixing dairy and meat. It also wants us to be more minimalistic in all areas of life. Our brains were not designed to multitask; when we keep our lives simple, we find calmness and joy. Goethe's art became far more elegant and soothing after his trip to Italy in 1786 when he saw th...

When Moses received the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, law reached its pinnacle of glory. But unfortunately, law is not always so elevated. It can often be a swampy, hypocritical, grotesque affair. When we romanticize the ability of courts to bring about change, we make things too easy on ourselves. A court should be seen more as an "emergency room" than as the Parthenon. Franz Kafka was always...

Our best thoughts often come from not-thinking. Our wisest actions come when we don't act. German philosopher Martin Heidegger advocated the concept of "Gelassenheit" in order to escape our addiction to thinking and willing. But Heidegger struggled to explain how to achieve Gelassenheit. The Torah already had the practical solution to Gelassenheit figured out. Every seven days, seven weeks, seven...

WILL you listen to this Schrift episode? Even though we may not feel the temptation to bow down to a statue of Zeus anymore, idol worship still creeps into our lives in sneaky ways. We have religious relationships, bordering on idolatry, with, say, love, success, sex, sports, evolution, even food. Yet, climate change has shown how it is the will which is our most dangerous and surreptitious foreig...

Moses pleads with God to let him into Israel. But God refuses. Instead of trying to explain away and rationalize away God's decision, might it be better to just acknowledge that this is sad, this is heartbreaking, this is a tragedy? Our culture has forgotten how to process the tragic. We try to smooth things over with clichés and silver linings. The Ancient Greeks knew how to confront tragedy: by...

For 99.9% of human history, it was the parents who were revered, who knew things, and the children who were mocked, who were ignorant of all that was important. That all changed in Germany's Sturm und Drang movement in the 1770s and ts Romantic movement. These epochs cleverly depicted the youth generation as the visionaries and the parents as hapless folks who just didn't "get it." Our culture rea...

We don't take our word seriously anymore. We make promises all the time, knowing that we are not going to follow through on them. Sure, I'll get coffee with you (when hell freezes over). Sure, I'll read that book you've recommended (when pigs fly). Sure, I'll marry you until death do us part (or until I get bored). In law, a contract doesn't require lawyers, a signature, or a written document. It...

There is something a bit odd about New Year's Eve. Why are we celebrating rebirth, renewal, and a fresh start, when everything is cold, grey, and dead outside? It is not exactly an inspirational time to begin making resolutions. It wasn't always this way. In Judaism, the year begins, not on Rosh Hashanah, as most people think, but actually at the dawn of spring. Many ancient cultures also celebrat...

Our minds want to serve us. But the problem is that they don’t always do such a good job. This is because of a mismatch between contemporary society and our brains, which evolved for the wild. In Kafka’s Zürau Aphorisms, he wrote that all thinking is just consolation, and therefore it is never true consolation. Thinking does not lead us to the Infinite. It tends to have a quicksand effect. To gras...

The literary characters we most fall in love with are those who are flawed, imperfect, human, all-too-human. This tendency is one-thousand times more true with people in real life than with literary figures. Nobody wants to hang out with someone who is "perfect." And yet, society pressures us to wear a mask of innocence and perfection to the world. Ironically, it is "innocence" which threatens our...

Nietzsche feared that the drive toward equality would cause people to become more mediocre. If you look at morning talk shows, you see how accurate Nietzsche's predictions were. We tend to get all teary-eyed whenever we hear the word "equality" mentioned, but might equality be a double-edged sword and a mask? Once upon a time, it was taken as a given that hierarchy and rank existed in a society, y...

If you were to tell your doctor that laughter is the best medicine, your doctor would probably laugh at you, which is no small irony. Yet, when we laugh, we infuse our bodies with feelings of joy, relaxation, and relief. Believing in our own health and our own well-being can at times serve as a kind of medicine. This may be the real reason why the Hebrews lost their first attempt to conquer Canaan...

We tend to think that the more information we have about a person, the better we know that person. Yet, this is not the case. Just because we have spent our whole lives with "ourselves" does not mean we really "know" ourselves. To know oneself requires one to lose one's ego. When you lose your ego and know yourself, you will simultaneously be better able to connect with others and with God. In Hes...

In the Torah, there is a law that if anyone touches a corpse, they need to go outside the camp for awhile, or they may infect other people with death. When the Torah was written, it was simply obvious to everyone that death was bad and life was good. Yet, this simple premise that "death = bad" and "life = good" has been forgotten in modern days. This is because modern "preachers of death" trick us...

Seinfeld was not a show about nothing. Rather, it was a show about trivialities, trifles, mundane occurrences. This is not nothing. Nothing, in fact, is a lot more complicated -- and, according to Kabbalah, a lot more holy. One show which really may have been about nothing was Kafka's short story "The Hunger Artist," published in 1922. Nothingness is not an empty white room, or a black void, or a...

Children figure out pretty quickly that even if they're bad they will still get Christmas presents from Santa Claus. So, why be good? Why follow the Mitzvot if God will not smite us? Or will He? Nah, He won't. Right? Even if you don't believe that God will personally smite you for breaking Shabbat, perhaps the Mitzvot have their own logic, such that if we don't keep them, our personal well-being w...

We tend to think of greed and gluttony in financial and caloric terms respectively. And yet, it is possible to be greedy and gluttonous for just about anything in life. Paradoxically, one can even become greedy to not be greedy. Goethe's Faust marked a turning point in literature as the play showed how previous sins like wealth, drunkenness, and debauchery, had lost their appeal to modern humans....

Is there really a difference between simile and metaphor? When Paul Simon sings "I am a rock," no one thinks he actually is a literal pebble on seashore. But then why does he not sing "I am like a rock" instead? In Kafka's The Metamorphosis , Gregor Samsa isn't just "like" a bug, but actually "is" a bug. Yet we, as humans, are quick to transform Gregor back into a human, to the bug as just a "symb...

Today, we tend to dismiss people who are overly concerned with what others think as being egotistical or weak or sensitive. But actually, caring what others think of us, wanting be liked by the group, was an absolutely crucial personality trait in ancient societies. Yet, this remains a difficult reality for us to swallow. Our society tends to glorify the people who stand out from the crowd, who we...

Kant discovered that our minds are storytelling machines. We are masters at taking a limited set of data from the outside world and weaving this into a narrative. Yet, the narrative we end up telling ourselves often ends up not being a cute and endearing child's bedtime story but more like a scandalous drama or horror film. The storeis we tell ourselves often bring our deepest insecurities to the...

You may not realize it, but each time you say "thank you," you are making a kind of mini-sacrifice. In this sense, you are not so different from ancient peoples who made animal sacrifices to the gods. What is "thank you" other than a momentary emptying of yourself in acknowledgement of a gift or favor you have received. The Torah's emphasis on animal sacrifices was also a reaction in the ancient w...

Certain questions cannot be answered with mere logic and reason. When you try to interpret Kafka's literature, each time you answer one question, ten more appear in its place. The convoluted and cumbersome opening lines to Vayikra indicate that speaking directly to the Infinite is not going to be as simple as knocking on the door and being let inside. Romantic irony occurs when a text reflects bac...

It is not an accident that some people feel they were born to be dentists, and others feel they were born to be professors. Nor is it an accident that some people want to have large families, while others wish to remain single for their entire lives. Our society has a lamentably oversimplified concept of natural selection. We think that our greatest drives are to survive and procreate. Yet, Darwin...