X-Mezuzah?

May 30-31, 2025 • 4 Sivan 5785 • BaMidbar (Num 1-4).

Shabbat Table Talk from the desk of Rabbi Alexander Seinfeld

Christians hanging mezuzahs on their front doors?

Apparently it's a thing.

Not to be confused with the solidarity mezuzah.

And Jewish people are divided. Here are some sample comments:

• I’m so infuriated.
• I'm not gonna lie, this kinda irritates me.
• Who cares?? As long as they support Jewish people, I do not care. Seriously baffled by the reactions here!
• Guys, do you not realize that it's too late for gatekeeping? Literally their entire religion is an appropriation of ours. I highly doubt it's going to be such a trend that all Christians follow so that you wouldn't be able to tell if it's a Jewish mezuzah or not. If we let ourselves get offended every time something like this happens, we won't have time or energy to do anything else. Pick your battles wisely.
• If I saw this at someone’s house, I’d leave.
• So many negative messages here. It does not bother me at all.
• According to the Gospels, Jesus’ teachings replaced the old laws of Torah. So why do Christians want to be like Jews? It makes no sense.
• A growing trend is to do stuff like this with an intention of showing solidarity. We’re free to take it as we want (I don’t agree with it), but at least they aren’t breaking out the torches and pitchforks to run us out of town.
• Don't care. As long as they're not using kosher mezuzah scrolls, let 'em have fun. Honestly, it's much better than hating every single thing about us and wanting us all dead.

First question for your table: What's your opinion? 

Second question: In your mind, is there any difference between the Christian mezuzah and the Messianic one?

(PS - Rabbi Tovia Singer has an opinion about this.)

Shabbat Shalom

and 

Chag Sameach!


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HARdball Questions?

Apropos the Kit, try asking these two questions at your Shabbat table:

Shabbat Table Talk from the desk of Rabbi Alexander Seinfeld

May 23-24, 2025 • 27 Iyar 5785 • BeHar (Lev 25-end).

If you read this "Table Talk" blog regularly, you know that sometimes I pitch softballs and sometimes hardballs.

The weekly aim is provocative open-ended questions that hopefully anyone can have an opinion about, fostering dinner table conversation.

By “hardball,” I mean questions that have a higher chance of pushing emotional buttons.

Today, this week’s current events have prompted such questions. 

I’m referring to this DC tragedy, the wanton snuffing out of life of these two young Israelis.

Some have labeled the murder anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism means of course, Jew-hatred.

First question for your table: But were they targeted for being Jewish or for being Israeli? And does it make a difference?

How about this…

It turns out that Yaron Lischinsky has a Jewish father and Christian mother who raised him Christian and he was a member of the FFOZ Bram Center for Messianic Jewish Learning in Jerusalem. Therefore, according to most definitions of "Jewish" (other than Jews for Jesus), he wasn’t an MOT.

Therefore (second question for your table): Does that fact change your assessment of whether or not the murder was anti-Semitic?

Third question – and this is the hardest one: Was this tragedy a wake-up call that it's time that we start to consider Messianic Jews to be part of the Jewish People? What do you think? And if not, was it a wake-up call in any way?

Another angle on the same topic: 

This week I had a conversation with someone who considers himself Jewish and whom others consider Jewish who calls himself an atheist. When I asked him to clarify if he meant atheist as opposed to agnostic, his response wasn’t crystal-clear, so it is possible that he was technically agnostic. But either way, he calls himself atheist and celebrates a few Jewish traditions like Pesach because he enjoys them. 

Now, is such a person any less Jewish than a Jew for Jesus who keeps all of the holidays, eats kosher etc.? What do you think?


Shabbat Shalom


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Are You Heart of Hearing?

Apropos the Kit, try asking these two questions at your Shabbat table:

Shabbat Table Talk from the desk of Rabbi Alexander Seinfeld

May 16-17, 2025 • 20 Iyar 5785 • Emor (Lev 21-24).

Does this every happen to you — the same subject comes up repeatedly in one week from unrelated sources?

Like a recurring dream, but in real life?

Is it a sign that I should be focusing there?

This week my recurring-dream subject was hearing.

As in the physiological process of converting sound waves into information via the two marvelous instruments on the sides of our heads.

It came up in several unrelated conversations.

One was an email from a friend who wrote,

I believe blasting music at a wedding is anti-Torah, and unacceptable. King David showed us that dancing at a simchah should indeed be with all our hearts. But David did not give into the music (which could not have been very loud at all compared to today’s amplification) – he celebrated before Hashem and for His glory.

That's an interesting angle. I'm personally more concerned about the hearing damage caused by loud music which is real and permanent.

Another hearing-related conversation this week - Someone told me that a certain teacher used our "Ear" unit from our Ma Rabu!/Amazing Nature Curriculum, and that (predictably) her students were enthralled. (Here's the general-studies version.)

Today is Lag B'Omer, a holiday closely associated with music. It's also strongly associated with Torah and the most foundational foundation of Torah, Love Your Neighbor.

Question for your table: What's the connection between music and Love Your Neighbor?

Maybe you'll get some interesting answers from the table. Here's mine:

Great music in ensemble can only happen when the musicians are listening to each other. It doesn't matter how great the music is on paper - it could be the most exhilarating Beethoven symphony, but if the musicians are not listening to each other, it's going to sound terrible. 

That's exactly how Love Your Neighbor works. I can't treat you properly if I am not paying attention to you. I need to listen to you and really hear you. To listen with my heart and not only my head.


Happy Lag B'Omer and

Shabbat Shalom


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What's Great Spiritual Leadership?

Shabbat Table Talk from the desk of Rabbi Alexander Seinfeld

May 9-10, 2025 • 13 Iyar 5785 • AM-Kedoshim (Lev 16-20).

Now we're talking! An American Pope. 

But do we really care? 

First of all, you can ask this at your table - Does anyone know what the word "Pope" means?

It means "father" - from Greek pappas - and the full appellation is "Holy Father."

What makes him holy? Among other things, celibacy.

In their religion, the body and the physical world are ultimately unholy and the source of sin, and therefore the holiest people practice celibacy (which regardless of the sociological and historical basis, is the lived reality and projected value of their holiest people), and they teach that the ultimate goal of life is to escape this world of sin and go to Heaven.

Note our diametrical disagreement with them! Judaism teaches that the world is not inherently sinful, that it has the potential to be elevated, and indeed it is our job to elevate the physical to its spiritual potential - we are the bridge between Heaven and Earth.

Now, since we have all this chatter about American-bred spiritual leadership, what's a Jewish example?

While one could find many historically great examples, one of the all-time most famous and influential American-born rabbis was Rav Avigdor Miller (1908-2001) ztzl. His pre-Holocaust European yeshiva studies made him a great Torah expert, and his upbringing enabled him to fully relate to the American Jewish experience, and making him particularly quotable. Here are a couple of my favorites:

If people would know how to live properly - and by properly I mean happily - they would live with moderation. They would eat what they have to eat, and they would drink what they have to drink, and they would enjoy it so much that their lives would be overflowing with happiness and satisfaction. It would be a life of lo chosarta davar [not lacking]!

~

When you eat breakfast, learn to enjoy it to the hilt! Fully! Live deeply, richly, on your piece of bread and salt and water... When the tzaddik eats, he enjoys it. He really is happy with his food. That glass of water is more delicious to him than the most expensive champagne. Tzaddikim are not only people who look forward to the pleasure of Olam HaBa (the Next World) but have pleasure in this world, too.

These glimpses into the mind of a great Torah leader can lead us back to our main theme  — What's great spiritual leadership?

Shabbat Shalom


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Vegetative Electron Microscopy?

Shabbat Table Talk from the desk of Rabbi Alexander Seinfeld

May 2-3, 2025 • 5 Iyar 5785 • Tazria-Metzora (Lev 12-15).

Dovetailing on last week's theme of AI-generated art, try reading the above title to your table and ask, Can anyone can guess what it means???

If anyone guesses that it is meaningless, they are 100 percent right.

So how do you explain that it appears in published scientific papers?

The answer is long and convoluted. In short, apparently there was an error in an automatic scan of an old article where the word "vegetative" and the phrase "electron microscopy" appeared in adjacent columns of text.

Once that error was out there, it became replicated when non-Anglophones used AI to generate translations (or possibly to generate fraudulent papers). 

The details of this story were explained recently by Aaron Snoswell et al. in The Conversation, as an example of a real phenomenon:

Like biological fossils trapped in rock, these digital artefacts may become permanent fixtures in our information ecosystem.

We Jews have a great sensitivity to the subject of transmission accuracy. Our entire body of wisdom and culture known as Judaism relies on accurate transmission and our scholars are always on the lookout for errors. Even when reading the Torah ritually in shul, if the Torah scroll contains even one error, it must be put aside until fixed, and if the reader makes even a tiny error, anyone paying attention shouts out the correction.

Question for your table - which system of knowledge transmission is in the long-run going to prove more accurate - the traditional Jewish one, or the new AI one?


Shabbat Shalom