Jews believein individual and collective participation in an eternal dialoguewith God through tradition, rituals, prayers and ethical actions. Christianity generally believes in a Triune God, one person of whom became human. Judaism emphasizes the Oneness of God and rejects the Christian concept of Go...
Jewish law requires that one immerse in a mikveh as part of the process ofconversionto Judaism. It also requires women to immerse beforegetting marriedand when observing the laws ofniddah(menstrual purity). There are also various other reasons — both traditional and modern — that women, as w...
In Judaism, a mitzvah is a commandment from God. There are 613 mitzvot, which are divided into positive and negative categories...
The Hebrew month of Tishrei, as we all know, is jam-packed with holidays (thus creating the unique Israeli Delay Syndrome of “After the chagim!”). Along with the many mitzvot during this time are several beautiful customs that, while they are not technically required by Jewish law, never...
Frume Sarah is Shabbos-observant -- in a Reform way, that is. Please note that from Friday afternoons until one hour after sundown on Saturday evenings, Frume Sarah will be unavailable, in observance of the Jewish Sabbath. Comments made during this time will be held in a queue, to be mod...
As children of the free woman, gentile believers in Christ should not enslave themselves to the mitzvot. In Genesis, Sarah explicitly refers to a one-time act: “Drive out this slave and her child, for the child of this slave will not share in the inheritance with my son, Isaac” (Gen...
“The individual actions we do — the climate mitzvot we practice — are prayers in the form of action. We know that they do not substitute for communal action. We know that they are perhaps not effective in some total calculus. But we still do them. It’s like pr...
Judaism, conversely, is about what you do: a good life is defined by carrying out the mitzvot (usually translated as “commandments”). The Old Testament is generally concerned with practice rather than belief. This continues to the (accurate!) modern aphorism that being a good Jew does not...
I had just finished my first course in calligraphy and decided to do an independent study in Hebrew writing. I studied the books of Aryeh Kaplan and began going to Torah classes. Letter by letter, the alef bet led me to discover Chassidus, an authentic, HAPPY Judaism that was deeply satisf...
It is not some inexplicable belief in revelation that brings us to keep mitzvot, but rather it is the connection to mitzvot that makes us experience the Torah as coming from God. It is our way of bringing the divine into our lives and of finding our place as Jews in a large world. ...