There is a moment in the tractate Menahot when the Rabbis imagine what takes place when Moses ascends Mount Sinai to receive the Torah. In this account (there are several) Moses ascends to heaven, where...

Most people don’t want to die, but they don’t want to live either. I am speaking about men now as much as women. They look for a third way, but there is no third way.

Starlets were always turning up dead in people’s pools. They fished them out like goldfish. Nobody seemed to find it unusual that so many young, beautiful women wanted to die.

The Talmud tells a story about a great Rabbi who is dying, he has become a goses, but he cannot die because outside all his students are praying for him to live and this is...

It means that the things that make us human often make us ill.

The Talmud offered a virtual home for an uprooted culture, and grew out of the Jewish need to pack civilization into words and wander out into the world. The Talmud became essential for Jewish survival...