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PODCAST

Judaism for the Thinking Person

Rabbi Nadav Caine

Scholarly, Compassionate, and Practical Jewish Teachings on God, Prayer, Torah and Kabbalah with Rabbi Nadav Caine (ravnadav)

religion & spirituality judaism

All Episodes

13:22

Moses the Mother in Transition (Ilana Kurshan’s...

Judaism for the Thinking Person ·

2022/08/28

I share Ilana Kurshan's teaching on rabbinic midrash seeing Moses as a mother in transition, as they question whether, at the promised land border, God's refusing his entry is frustrating his desire to mother the people more, or frustrating his desire to claim "his turn" to actually have a life now that the children are leaving the nest. I include my own glosses, but make no mistake that this is Ilana Kurshan's teaching.

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14:03

Eikev and the Torah of Ambivalence

Judaism for the Thinking Person ·

2022/08/21

In this d'var Torah, I discuss how parashat Eikev is the section of Torah most frought with ambivalences, from the text itself through the Rabbinic commentaries: blessing as bounty and overextension, independence and dependence, hardship and privilege, closeness and distance. I relate this to our lives directly in the examples of the college experience and of our relationship with God.

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09:26

Ableism, Torah, and ”Greatness Comes from Being...

Judaism for the Thinking Person ·

2022/05/22

How do we relate to the Torah's insistence that the kohanim who do the major rituals be without blemish or disability? Isn't that grossly ableist? I suggest the following. First, the Torah is not an idealistic description of a utopia of saints -- it forces us to recognize truths about human nature, and then create a society for real people like us, so it forces us to recognize our own prejudices and ableism, which are also active today. Second, there is a serious issue at stake involving the

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12:17

Judaism and Abortion: The Process of the Decision IS...

Judaism for the Thinking Person ·

2022/05/10

In this presentation, I present the Talmudic sources on Judaism's discussion of the status of the fetus, and I argue that what's been missing from the discussion --including the discussion of Jewish views -- is the fact that Judaism leaves open what the status of the fetus is between 40 days and full viability, but importantly assigns the process to the mother. Men have no say in it. In other words, the issue is not freedom of religion in the sense of one denomination versus another, but rather the

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05:14

Believing in Miracles (or not) in 5 Minutes

Judaism for the Thinking Person ·

2022/04/19

One of my "standing on one foot while answering a humungous theological question" podcasts. "Rabbi, what do we mean by miracles? What is up with the Red Sea splitting?" I give my on-one-foot 5 minute answer, but we should all go and study (as Hillel famously said after answering his on-one-foot answer) afterward. By the way, I refer to seeing a red butterfly in the answer: at a funeral and shivah I officiated at, it came up repeatedly that a butterfly would show up in their lives just at the

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21:29

Is the Wailing Wall an Orthodox Synagogue? The Kotel...

Judaism for the Thinking Person ·

2022/03/18

At the same time as the Torah turns its pages to describe the creation and pattern of the Temple, with men, women, and children mixed together, and the haftarah describes the construction of the Temple in Jerusalem as the same, the Israeli government reneges on the Kotel Agreement to provide a separate space for mixed gender worship near the Wailing Wall, even while turning over the Wall officially to ultra extremist fundamentalist Jews who claim that the inclusion of women --or women leading prayer

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11:50

Self-Improvement, Judgment, and Seeing God’s Back

Judaism for the Thinking Person ·

2022/02/21

While Judaism demands that one does not judge oneself too harshly, nor live in a place of self-defeating criticism, nevertheless there's a vital role for self-judgment to play in our learning from the past to walk with God and expand our ability to channel holiness into the world. In fact, since God loves us as we are, and even provides a Shabbat that makes us feel that the world is made for us as we are, it is vital we judge ourselves, because that's not the job God wants, nor is it the job for

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11:44

Clothing God? Sewing as an Act of Lovingkindness

Judaism for the Thinking Person ·

2022/02/14

The Talmud tells us that the first great act of God's love (chesed, lovingkindness) was making clothing for Adam and his wife. Do we return the favor?

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07:53

Does God Have a Plan for Us?

Judaism for the Thinking Person ·

2022/01/30

Joseph's dreams seem to predict the future and his role in it. So does God have a plan for us?

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48:41

Lecture: Halakhic Sources, the Fetus, and the...

Judaism for the Thinking Person ·

2022/01/17

The source sheet I'm reading from is at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1R0Txiy6QvQiHo40hKSsHyafLernFjS8tXp0tJo7gPWA/edit?usp=sharing This is a lecture to give the listener the Rabbinic sources that create distinctions and legal status for decisions around the criminalization of elective abortion, as discussed in the Supreme Court hearings.

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22:54

Patriarchy, Gaze, Voice and Intersectionality? ...

Judaism for the Thinking Person ·

2021/12/28

Here I tease out the following ideas of bell hooks: 1. Our society valuing power over others as the paramount value, and rooted in the psychology of men. 2. This value playing out in drama as "the protagonist" as the center around which others must revolve, and often the only one whose name counts. 3. Oppositional gaze: the one who owns their justice perspective is the one who has the power to gaze at injustice [like Moses having the privilege to "gaze" at the taskmaster beating a Hebrew slave]. 4

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14:09

Joseph‘s Brothers and Robert Bly‘s The Sibling Society

Judaism for the Thinking Person ·

2021/12/22

Robert Bly, one of America's great poets and poetry translators, recently died. In this presentation, I apply Bly's books of social commentary to the end of Genesis. Iron John described the effects of fathers turning over parenting duties to others --like the wrong-headed "kids learn from interacting with other kids" rather than with parents. It also argued for the simultaneous absence of initiative rites in American society. In The Sibling Society, Bly argued that American society represents an

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13:45

Joseph, Hanukkah, and the Assimilation Narrative

Judaism for the Thinking Person ·

2021/12/13

These are my reflections upon Arnold Eisen's 2015 essay, "Joseph, Hanukkah, and the Dilemmas of Assimilation." Those who investigate the Hanukkah story quickly learn (simply by reading the Books of Maccabees in the apocrypha) that the events around the 186 BCE revolt of the Maccabees against the Hellenizing-Syrians do not involve a miracle of oil. Rather, following the decree by Antiochus IV that the Temple in Jerusalem be dedicated to Hellistic religion, the Maccabees first attack Hellenized Jews

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16:58

The Incommunicability of Experience and the Rape of...

Judaism for the Thinking Person ·

2021/11/29

[WARNING: The second half of the podcast discusses the rape of Dinah and I share an account of sexual harrassment from recent congressional testimony.] If the early chapters of Genesis are about where we come from, the second half of Genesis is about the experiences that change us, that make us who we are as adults, not through our own achievements but through what happens to us, from tragedy to transcendence, from rejection to love, from struggles with mental health, sexual harrasment, being

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15:23

Dara Horn‘s ”People Love Dead Jews” and the Erasure...

Judaism for the Thinking Person ·

2021/11/17

In this sermon -- playing on the Rabbinic commentary that the name of the Torah portion that mentions Sarah's death is called "The Life [or Lives] of Sarah" because we should celebrate the lives she lead rather than think of her death-- I discuss Dara Horn's new book People Love Dead Jews, which argues that the non-Jewish world loves books about Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel because the stories of these dead Jews teaches us something universal and moralistic about ourselves, rather than challenging us

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20:24

Changing our Relationship with Time from Productivity...

Judaism for the Thinking Person ·

2021/11/01

It hasn't been very long in human history (two or three generations) that we live our lives according to a clock rather than according to the processes of our lives (waking up, milking the cow, putting the hay in the barn, taking the goats for their grazing...). This has changed our relationship to God, to ourselves, and to each other. We judge ourselves by our productivity, how much we can get done using this resource of time, how much demand we can meet from others before our next appointments

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15:48

The Potentially Limitless Commandment of Honoring...

Judaism for the Thinking Person ·

2021/10/26

In this dvar Torah, I share Talmudic stories of rabbis trying to honor their mothers in ways that are both comical and also poignant in their alluding to our individual (and often lonely) struggles to honor God and them, especially as they age, with seemingly no yardstick to compare ourselves and manage expectations.

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29:29

Combatting the Curses Against Israel with History,...

Judaism for the Thinking Person ·

2021/10/10

The last sections of the book of Numbers deal with the local tribes, themselves fighting and displacing each other, refusing to grant the Israelite refugees safe passage through their lands. As a consequence of this moral failing, they lose the right to keep the land --an important message of Torah. In fact, coupled with their denials of safe passage, they hire the famous Near-Eastern Bilaam to magically curse the Israelites with fraught words justifying violence against them. It's like this

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19:19

Instagram, Depression and the Serpent Voice: ”And...

Judaism for the Thinking Person ·

2021/10/04

The creation stories of Genesis blend mythological motifs with reflections on the moral consequences of human evolution. When we understand the serpent voice to be the appearance of the human inner voice --the beginnings of evolutionary, human self-consciousness, a consequence of eating of the fruit of the garden-- then the hiding that Adam does, not because they have disobeyed God (as one presumes on a first read) but because for the first time they know they are naked, is crucial to notice. The

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25:15

The Halakhah of Zoom Minyan: Adding Windows to the...

Judaism for the Thinking Person ·

2021/09/26

Synagogues like mine have resorted to making virtual community over much of the pandemic. How do we do a heshbon nefesh of the experience: a reckoning of the pluses and minuses as we enter a new future of self-creation? What is the halakhah of it, what have we learned, what are the issues? In this Kol Nidrei sermon, I address these issues, as we consider who we wish to be as we enter the future.

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130 results

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