The Schrift - Ancient Jewish Wisdom for Modern Times

In order to understand the speed of light, Einstein had to think counterintuitively. He had to forget our typical notions of space and time. Einstein figured out that light behaves fundamentally differently from what we are used to experiencing. To understand God, we need to think similarly. The God of the Torah is highly anthropomorphized so that God can be understandable to the limits of the hum...

Dramatic irony occurs when we know something about a character's fate which the character himself does not know. The ability to predict the character's future fate takes audiences on emotional rollercoasters as we wish to jump out of our seats to help the character, but know we are powerless to do so. Yet, is it not the case that we view our own lives through the lens of dramatic irony all the tim...

Why do hundreds of people travel from distant lands to see the Mona Lisa but then when they finally get there, their first act is to take out their cameras and snap a picture of it? Walter Benjamin's 1936 essay "On the Reproducibility of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" discusses how, in modern times, art can be reproduced on a massive scale. This technology causes copies of art, even if...

We tend to think of suck-ups as just exasperating, but ultimately harmless, pests. In fact, they are the great movers and shakers of society. They parrot back the values of their bosses at the office. Over time, these values spread like a virus, and are no longer subjective values but just “normal beliefs.” The Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci knew that, to change society, it was not enough to...

Why is it that people so often close themselves off to good advice? Why do people stubbornly refuse to meditate or consider controversial nutrition tips? Moses was open to new ideas, and he took the advice of his father-in-law with graciousness. Among the great German composers, Mendelssohn may have been too willing to take advice and yield his individuality, whereas Wagner was too egotistical and...

Irony is more than just a literary device; the Zeitgeist of an age or the Weltanschauung of a people can be inferred by looking into their use of irony. Our current age is so saturated with irony that we have plunged irony into the most advanced stages: into meta-irony, hyper-irony, and postmodern irony. In his 1841 work, On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, the Danish phi...

In this week’s parsha, God takes the extraordinary decision of killing off every first-born being in Egypt in order to finally force the Pharaoh’s hand. These first-born beings include not just the Egyptian aristocracy, but also the peasants, the middle-class, even the animals. Yes, even the cute, innocent, first-born animals must die so that the Hebrews can be let free. At worst, God’s decision i...

Have you ever thought about the heart? I mean really thought about it? We have the word heartfelt, which we all immediately understand. Why don’t we have words for other organs? Why don’t we say kidneyfelt or brainfelt or liverfelt or gallbladderfelt? It has been the trend in recent years to praise the toughness and almost ruthlessness of leaders. This is a trope that never seems to get old, it wo...

How do we handle uncomfortable questions? Do we ignore them and bottle them up, or do we turn toward them? In the Swiss-German writer Jeremias Gotthelf's novel The Black Spider, we witness how a society deals with threats to its perception of Christianity. Judaism is also not immune from questions of legitimacy. In his 1939 book, Moses and Monotheism, Freud posited that Moses was actually not a He...

In the West, we tend to view thoughts on their own terms rather than as symptoms and reflections of the state of our body. Literary characters like Othello, George Costanza, Josef K., and Marie Weltstern, allowed a thought of doubt to become their realities. In the Torah, we see how characters like Jacob and Joseph naturally overcome doubt through cultivation of a strong inner core and a robust ph...

The story of Joseph and his brothers represents a coming-of-age saga, predating the formal Bildungsroman of Goethe by thousands of years. Even though Joseph credits God for all of his success in life, the Torah seems to be hinting that we should see ourselves as most responsible for our happiness and prosperity. Nietzsche's concept of the Übermensch shows that we would do better to connect with th...

There is a moment during a tennis match where the ball hits the net and hangs in the air for an instant. In this moment, the ball seems to decide for itself whether to go forward or go backward. "Luck" seems to decide -- but what is luck? This phenomenon of the tennis ball occurs in our dreams as well: we can dream about pretty much anything. We have no control over our dreams; they proceed irrega...

Ironically, opposites often turn out to be nearly identical. Religion and atheism, life and death, infinity and the moment, nihilism and transcendence. According to Thomas Mann, when Joseph and Jacob sat together in Jacob's tent, they celebrated a Passover seder. Does this view represent the theology of the Talmud or the secularism of biblical archaeology? Perhaps it can be both, and more. From Ni...

Why is it that our negative and painful thoughts are most likely to stick around? To what lengths will the ego to protect itself? How should we handle the lust for revenge? In this episode, I discuss the revenge which Simon and Levi took when a young prince had sex with their sister Dinah. When confronted with feelings for revenge, we often fall back on ingrained clichés from Christian morality th...

The words romance, Romantic, and Roman are intimately connected and yet easily misunderstood. With Jacob's love for Rachel, he could have inspired thousands of future romantic comedies. He also seems to have been the first "knight" of medieval courtly love poetry. Yet, the Torah shows that fertility may be a more important value than love or romance. The perils of the over-Romantic would be furthe...

Freud, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky observed that we are not masters of our own house. We are guided by deep, unconscious forces, which we are unaware of. Sometimes the unconscious leads us astray, but other times it serves as our most trusted adviser. In this week's Parsha, we see how Isaac's unconscious allowed him to choose the right son to be the heir for Israel. In our hyper-rationalistic societ...

Martin Buber's 1923 work Ich und Du distinguishes between "I/You" and "I/It" relationships. The modern world pressures us to see everything as "it" -- something to be used for personal gain and to be exploited. It is only when we see others as "You" -- as subjects rather than objects -- that we can feel completed and connected with the Universe. To see others, whether they be plants, animals, or h...

What does it mean to be a "nice guy"? Where does morality come from? These are not trivial questions. Could it be that Abraham had more in common with Odysseus than with Jesus? Why are we so drawn to Michael Jordan, who could be mean, domineering, and brash? And finally, the important distinction between compassion through overflowing abundance and compassion through pity. IG: Stevehead0001 steven...

The modern world limits us, both our bodies and our minds. Yoga teaches us how new body positions (asanas) can allow us to embody new selves. Modernity has also pressured us to view our sense of self in binary terms: we are either animal or human, strong or weak, East or West. Hermann Hesse's buddhist novel Der Steppenwolf allows us to visualize that there are thousands of selves within us. Finall...

In what is actually our third episode (the first episode is "episode 0"), we meet Noah, famous for steering a mighty ark through a torrential apocalypse, but less well-known for his work on a vineyard after the flood. We discover how both Apollo and Utilitarianism have, unfortunately, largely eclipsed the Dionysian and the Kantian in our society. We finally ask whether we may be constructing a new...

In this episode, we explore why Adam and Eve suddenly became aware that they were naked after eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Nietzsche's loathing of shame provides a new way with which to view traditional notions of morality. steventobyweinberg.com IG: stevehead0001 Music: Bob Dylan - "Gates of Eden"

At first glance, the death of Moses just short of the Gates of Israel seems to be a cruel and unfair denouement for Judaism's greatest prophet. Yet, with the help of the Jena School, we can see Moses' "untimely" death as the ultimate gift and the pathway to the Eternal. steventobyweinberg.com IG: Stevehead0001 Music: Jimi Hendrix - "Little Miss Strange"