Three Great Reads from the Jewish Journal

Check out these fantastic new offerings from Jewish Journal writers on the topics that matter most to our readers:

Hooded men arrive, dressed in green and black keffiyehs, fists raised but gazes cold like robots. Two pickup trucks appear — trucks that, since Oct. 7, have carried the taste of Shani Louk’s blood, the young woman, half-naked, taken like a small animal, defiled, and murdered. Now we see Eli, Or, and Ohad — the three hostages, or rather, the ghost men — emaciated and powerless, dragged by the robot-men to the platform.

In the stillness after the flames die down, in the silence where walls once held laughter and doorways framed years of coming and going, a unique kind of grief exists. For those who lose a home — especially as suddenly and violently as happens in wildfires — that loss feels both intangible and all-consuming. It is experienced as a disorienting rupture in time and space.

The site of the giving of the Torah was about to become a tourist-packed heap of litter and Lance Morrow would have none of it.

The longtime Time Magazine reporter, who passed away earlier this winter, penned a short piece that put the kibosh on plans Egypt was developing in 1990. As The New York Times recounted in his obituary, Morrow’s wife, visiting Cairo at the time, heard of the development of a cable car railway that would ferry folks up to the summit of the mount. “People were desperate to stop it, so I called Lance and asked what we can do about it, and he wrote an essay in two hours that stopped it dead,” she said.

Three Great Reads from Around the Web

Every week, we scour the web for the best takes to feature in the Roundtable. Here are some of the most interesting articles that we found along the way:

As the James Webb Space Telescope sends back unprecedented images of galaxy formation from the dawn of time, humanity stands in awe of the cosmos like never before… Should our fascination with understanding the natural world be seen as competing with—or enhancing—our relationship with the Creator?

Traditional Jewish sources since Talmudic times have provided a clear answer: Scientific knowledge and religious understanding aren’t just compatible but deeply complementary.

I think that the most compelling case for being religious — for a default view, before you get to the specifics of creeds and doctrines, that the universe was made for a reason and we’re part of that reason — is found at the convergence of multiple different lines of argument, the analysis of multiple different aspects of the existence in which we find ourselves.

I love the way that people talk online. And on a good day, I genuinely think the internet has made people funnier and more creative. For instance, take this fairly anodyne post on X from 2023: “Financially, whatever happened in July can’t happen again.” For whatever reason, the people of the internet saw one man’s budgeting struggles as a blank template for their own posts, which got stranger and more ornate as they went on—until we reached what, for me, was the post of the year: “What happened to my ankles tonight mosquitologically can never happen again.”

Commentary on Parashat Yitro

Parashat Yitro begins with the advice given by Yitro, Moses’ father-in-law, to the people of Israel, and continues to tell us about the gathering of the people of Israel at Mount Sinai and about the giving of the Ten Commandments.

Sinai is a holy mountain for the duration of the Sinaitic theophany. As soon as this historic moment ends, its holiness evaporates, leaving no residue. The mountain is fenced off to prevent the Israelites from so much as touching its base during the revelation, but as soon as the revelation is over, the boundaries are taken down. It becomes again an ordinary mountain, undifferentiated in the desert landscape. The Israelites sojourn on, never to return to that place.

I’m convinced that if every Jew understood the power and poetry of our ancient language, every synagogue, every Jewish community would be bustling. There wouldn’t be enough hours in the day to meet the needs of Jews who want to get together and dive into the sea of our textual tradition.

But if there was a single verse in all of Torah to spark our great Hebrew revolution, it might be this one: Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy.

This week’s parsha, Yitro, holds one of the most iconic moments in the Israelites’ journey, God’s revelation at Mount Sinai. According to a popularly referenced midrash, all Jews of all times were there. Variants of this midrash explain how teachings taught generations later are considered Torah (Shemot Rabbah 28:6), how Jews-by-choice sense that they belong (BT Shavuot 39a), and how the moment of revelation resonates spiritually thousands of years later (Midrash Tanchuma, Nitzavim 3).

Three New Jewish Podcasts

Just in time for the weekend, three new podcasts about Judaism, Jewish culture, and Israel.

In the 16 months since October 7th, the leader who knows more than almost anyone about the inner workings of this war has barely been heard from – until now.

In this episode of ”Call Me Back”, we hear the behind the scenes story of the war with Hamas and Hezbollah from Yoav Gallant, who served as Israel’s Defense Minister for the first 13 months of this 16-month war.

On February 8, 2025, three hostages ascended from the dungeons of Hamas and returned to freedom in Israel: Eli Sharabi, age fifty-two; Or Levy, age thirty-four; and Ohad Ben Ami, age fifty-six. They had been held captive for sixteen months.

When the three men were first seen, and their images instantly projected onto social media and news sites and television sets across the world, many viewers had a similar reaction.

In this episode of the 18Forty Podcast, we talk to Frieda Vizel—a formerly Satmar Jew who makes educational content about Hasidic life—about her work presenting Hasidic Williamsburg to the outside world, and vice-versa.

Today’s Hot Issues

Three Great Reads from the Jewish Journal Three Great Reads from Around the Web Commentary on Parashat Yitro Three New Jewish Podcasts