Artículos

Have you ever heard the phrase “the God of the Old Testament”? It’s generally used to distinguish between the supposedly angry, vengeful,...

There few things more delightful that getting into an argument with your teenage child about the meaning of “freedom”. No, my dear son,...

Our obligations extend to both past and future. Almost all modern societies are based on variations of a single concept: the “Social...

Persephone was a unique goddess in Greek mythology. She lived an idyllic and lonely life in communion with Nature, far from the other...

The choice of Kohelet for Sukkot is a curious one. Sukkot is supposed to be the most joyous festival in our calendar, and yet, on it we...

Georg Friedrich Hegel was to modern thought what Plato was to Greek philosophy. Most of the ideological movements of the 19th and 20th...

If the purpose of Tisha Be’Av is to warn us about the dangers of internecine hatred, it has failed miserably. The year 403 BCE was...

Every time you scan your purchases at the grocery store self-checkout line, you’re learning Jewish mysticism. In 1948, the president of a...

Frederick Nietzsche believed that the Egyptians were blond. My apologies; I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start from the beginning:...

What if we are wrong about Purim? What if Purim is not the joyful holiday that we think it is, but a mordant exercise in self-criticism,...

Maybe what Haman wanted wasn’t so bad after all. He yearned for a homogeneous society, one in which people think the same thoughts, obey...

Lake Valencia in Venezuela was once a beautiful place. Nestled among mountains and sierras, and blessed by a humid and temperate climate,...

We’re more affected by architecture than we might want to believe. The built environment conditions our thoughts and behaviors. Every...

In 2007, at Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, scientists conducted a troubling experiment. They put people into...

In “Me and Bobby McGee,” the famous blues/rock song popularized by Janis Joplin, the narrator expresses a romantic view of freedom that...

Every culture has etiological myths, foundational stories that relate the origins of the people in question. Those stories — which...

Purim is a holiday in which we are not afraid to be ridiculous. We don funny costumes; we drink ourselves into oblivion; we are...

In 1972, during Richard Nixon’s visit to China, Premier Zhou Enlai was asked what he thought about the French Revolution. He responded,...

We don’t like to talk about it much, but one of the main themes of the High Holidays is death. Why do we traditionally dress in white?...

As funders, we need to stop watching [the] deterioration of civility from the sidelines. We certainly are part of the problem, but we are...

Every time I go back to Argentina my mother makes me feel like a child. She reminds me to button up my coat, impervious to the fact that...

As somebody who grew up in the Southern Hemisphere, the wintery nature of Chanukah used to elude me. During my childhood, Christmas fell...

Jewish tradition has a lot of paradoxes, but Sukkot is probably the biggest of them all. Yom Kippur probably hired PR consultants to make...

Imagine a country that says “we are going to get rid of all law enforcement agencies.” There will be no police, no army, and no coercion...