Book Covers

This one’s a doozy. Bear with me. Also, if you have a bit of context, you’ll know this ones strike quite close to home. TL;DR at the end. Here’s how the spiel goes: Judaism is amazing. It’s enlightened. It’s changed the world for the better. Judeo Christian values are da...

Interesting anecdote about this book cover. It's a composite of two different Rabbi faces, i.e. it's not any specific Rabbi, so that I wouldn't poke fun unnecessarily at someone. That's how much of a tzadik I am. From the back cover: Rabbi Shlomo Levi Birenshmaltz (ZATZHA"L: of blessed, blessed memory), like...

For intellectual honesty’s sake, I’ll acknowledge that this cover is a criticism of a specific strain of Jewish culture, namely the Mussar movement and its contemporary expression in (Israeli) Charedi society. It’s important for me to emphasize this because in general my criticisms are much broader, and pertain to...

In Judaism, we're taught, everything has the right context. Some days, you shouldn't eat anything.Other days, you should stuff yourself like a pig. Some days you shouldn't have sex at all.Other days, sex is a big mitzvah. Some days, you should be happy.Other days, sad.And others still, you should get so blacked...

From the back cover: “This generation, like every generation before it, is a confusing time. Like all eras, ours is the worst. More than ever, progress (a very unfortunate thing indeed) has created new situations that we are not accustomed to. What is a Jew to do? How can one can...

If I had a dollar for every time someone told me this, I'd have enough money to start my own religion. Or at least my own congregation. Same difference, really. Everyone seems to have some magical elusive Judaism that I'm missing out on."Your Judaism is not like my Judaism.""You should...

See also, Anal.

Judaism teaches that our interpersonal relationships are just a key to relating to God, especially our romantic ones. So, capitalizing on the bestselling book that opened people’s eyes to the fact that not all people are exactly the same, here’s our appropriation of this pop psychology masterpiece. The first...

It's been a while. Can you tell I'm angry? I guess this one has been too painful to even make fun of until now. I think this claim is probably the most pretentious and disappointing claim I encountered in Judaism. Let's leave aside the whole Rav Arush bullshit about women being the...

If you believe in God from a philosophical point of view, you shouldn’t need any emotional scaffolding to keep things up. The absurdity of one-off inspirational stories of any kind should be obvious to even the most casual of contemplators, and yet it forms a huge part of religious culture. I...