Tag Archives: suffering

(נתיב ההפקרה) Tisha B’Av (2025)

Posted on August 4, 2025 by zjb

Tisha B’Av directs the religious imagination deep into its own pain. This fearsome day looks straight ahead, neither to the right nor to the left. In the book of Lamentations, read on the fast day, the suffering that the collective … Continue reading →

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(Isaiah) Place of Consolation (7 Weeks)

Posted on August 20, 2024 by zjb

(Isaiah) What is Consolation (7 Weeks) In the prophetic imagination, consolation is a super violent and theopolitical counter-reality. Other-worldly without being otherworldly is the liturgical view drawn from the 7 haftaroth of consolation recited in the synagogue on Shabbat between … Continue reading →

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(Against Divine Violence) 9 Av (Lamentations)

Posted on August 13, 2024 by zjb

Read on the fast day of Tisha B’Av, the lament in the book of Lamentations (in Hebrew Eicha or Alas, named after the first word of the text) is a rebuke. But who is the object of recrimination? Only on … Continue reading →

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Moral Meaning and the Holocaust (James Loeffler)

Posted on April 27, 2022 by zjb

This piece here by James Loeffler on the one and the many and the Holocaust and comparative analysis is superbly nuanced. Of particular interst is Raphael Lemkin and the formulation of intenrational protocols defining genocide. While I do not necessarily … Continue reading →

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(Mother & Martyr) Mistress Rachel (Mainz Anonymous)

Posted on March 28, 2022 by zjb

There was a distinguished young woman there named Mistress Rachel, daughter of Isaac, son of Asher, who said to her friend: “Four children have I. Have no mercy on them either, lest those uncircumcised ones come and seize them alive … Continue reading →

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(Rashi) Anti-theodicy (Tisha B’Av)

Posted on July 19, 2021 by zjb

The through-line in Rashi’s commentary to Lamenations is that, yes, the people sin, but that God is responsible for the calamity, for what we today call anti-Semitism, for the human inclination to sin, for setting up a barrier between God … Continue reading →

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Haredi Response to Har Meron (Chaim Kanievsky)

Posted on April 30, 2021 by zjb

I’m posting this statement that was issued in the name of Harav Chaim Kanievsky responding to the Lag Ba’Omer disaster at Mt. Meron in Israel. Some forty-five people were killed at a stampede at a religious pilgrimage site, a mass … Continue reading →

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Buddhist Gods & Pandemics (Coronavirus)

Posted on June 25, 2020 by zjb

Excellent piece here at Immanent Frame by Brian Lowe about Buddhist Gods, pandemics, and political power:   But these gods did not only protect. They also observed and reported transgressors, who would in turn be punished. The celestial realm was itself a … Continue reading →

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(Without Justice And Without A Judge) Tulsa (לית דין ולית דיין)

Posted on June 19, 2020 by zjb

לית דין ולית דיין The accounts here of gruesome death from the race-massacre in Tulsa bring to mind the words of the arch heretic in midrash and Talmud, Elisha ben Abuye, reflecting in response to Roman rule; the world is … Continue reading →

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Care for a Corpse (Dignity) Coronavirus

Posted on May 17, 2020 by zjb

“There has to be some dignity in this, otherwise I might as well be a garbage man,” is what the funeral director told the journalist. The photographs by Philip Montgomery that accompany this article here in the NYT about two … Continue reading →

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