Philosophy

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...

Sample from chapter #1: Sex in Judaism is a beautiful thing. It’s also terrible. When you do it at the right time, it’s amazing. God himself sits there watching you and jerks off while you’re going at it. When you climax, he does too. Did you know? The relationship between God...

Some questions I had about Judaism, I got answers that worked, to a point. There were explanations that fit within a larger framework. And as long as that framework was intact, the answers worked. "Why does the Torah tell us to do this or that?""Because God said so." Fair enough. I can struggle...

“No other religion claims to have experienced public revelation. Therefore, it’s a claim that is so outlandish, that it must have actually occurred because otherwise no one else would have been stupid enough to believe in it, or brazen enough to ‘introduce’ it into the cultural narrative.” Thus goes the...