Torah and Spirituality

May 6, 20197 min read

Power to the People

Torah' for Israel's Jubilee May 1998 (first published Jerusalem Report) For 50 years, Israelis have allowed the state to shape their...

Mar 27, 20193 min read

Return to the Garden of Eden

Paashat Shlach Lecha. Originally published in "The People and the Book", Jerusalem Report, June 15 1995. The unfinished story of the...

Mar 25, 201910 min read

Why Has Social Justice been Written out of the Torah?

We are faced with a religious leadership that is largely indifferent to the economic gaps that have opened up in Israel, or the...

Mar 17, 201916 min read

Rabbi Yitz Greenberg: Profundity and Courage

Yitz Greenberg, 73 years old, is arguably the most important rabbi that American Jewry has yet produced, and the most profoundly American...

Mar 7, 201911 min read

Inside Out

In the past, those figures who most represented the Jewish people’s universalistic thrust, such as the Pauline Jesus and Marx, soundly...

Feb 28, 201915 min read

Shlomo's Torah

Shlomo’s Torah transported listeners emotionally and imaginatively, connecting them to inner states of longing and healing — to a...

Feb 17, 201911 min read

Brilliance of the Baal Shem Tov

Two hundred and fifty years after the Baal Shem Tov’s death, English readers finally have a scholarly compilation of some of his most...

Feb 14, 201913 min read

Yamima Avital: First Jewish Woman Mystic with her Own Written Torah

Punch Yamima Avital's name into a (Hebrew) Internet search engine and you will find forums with endless exchanges of information about...

Feb 13, 201918 min read

Judaism and the Crisis of the Rural Village in the Global South

For many of us nourished and inspired by the integrity and spiritual depth of the Orthodox tradition at its best, how to apply Torah to...

Feb 6, 20196 min read

The Zionist Dream Awaits a Peoplehood Vision

https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/the-zionist-dream-awaits-a-peoplehood-vision/ Eleven years ago, I created Tevel b’Tzedek, an Israeli...

Feb 6, 201913 min read

The Torah of Globalization

What guidance can the Jewish tradition, from the Bible onwards, give to us in the age of Neo-Liberal economic globalization? Although...

Apr 18, 200610 min read

The Messiah Code

https://www.haaretz.com/1.4901705 For 200 years, a mysterious manuscript dictated by Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav to his two closest...

michaodenheimer

May 10, 20207 min read

Freedom, climate change and the Pandemic

“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” So begins Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s book “The Social Contract.” I’ve been thinking...

Micha Zvi Odenheimer

Dec 19, 20195 min read

Language, Prayer, Compassion, Interpretation

Happy Chanuka! What follows are some words of Torah that I offered on Saturday night in honor of the 25th anniversary of the passing of...