Philosophy

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...

I struggled for a long time with the clash between my own values, own way of doing things, and own personality, and the confines of Jewish law. What if I don't like to be surrounded by other men three times a day as we supposedly talk to God?What if I'm...

Torah! Oh Torah! It’s the absolute truthIt’s better than coke or ice cold vermouthThe Torah’s our guide to tell us wrongful from rightfulTo make the right choices, now ain’t that delightful?Because you can't ever just trust your own teensy brainTo make moral choices, that would be a strain Our purpose...

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...

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...

So, yeah, in case you didn't know. This is totally a real law. If you didn't wipe your butt properly, any prayer or study you've done during that time is a sin instead of a virtue. The same law (guf naki) that argues that some women shouldn't be allowed...

"Never was there as happy a time," the Mishna says, "than Tu B’av. Because on that day all the young ladies would go out to the vineyards to sing and dance, and the dudes would hide in the trees and pick out the one they wanted to marry." Have you...

One of my biggest struggles, even when I was still religious, was with the realization that as a person I had grown way more from therapy and self-help books than from any amount of “Torah wisdom”. This was unacceptable to me. I didn’t want it to be this way. Torah...

You’re the daughter of a King! A king! How awesome is that? Not as awesome as being a son, apparently. I’ve heard, ad nausem, all the apologetic explanations about how women are not less, they’re just DIFFERENT. How the true home is built around the Jewish woman (Look! Jewishness passes...

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...