by Alex S. Ozar Masorah: A Philosophical User’s Guide The charge presented to me for this symposium was to discuss the concept of Masorah “from the perspective of philosophy.” At first I was skeptical: Is not the concept an inherently halakhic, historical, and theological one, such that would be more fruitfully engaged through a specifically halakhic, historical, or theological lens? ...

by R. Alex Ozar Religion is hard, and it’s supposed to be: Love of God should, by nature, be the sort of thing that claims all your heart, all your soul, all your worth. [1]Devarim 6:5. Halakhic Judaism complements this truth with an equal and opposite force: God loves us, and so wills that we live, [2]See Rashi to Sanhedrin 74a, s.v. ...

I Human beings are, in the best of cases, complex creatures – their identities fluid and their inner lives shot through with dynamic tension and ambivalence. For the individual person, this means a life’s vocation of forming the ragtag collection of energies populating his soul into an effectively coherent self. For the yerei shamayim, this quickening takes place in the ...

Rabbi David Hartman’s Theological Legacy: A Preliminary Evaluation Guest post by Alex Ozar Alex Ozar is a Fellow at the Tikvah Fund in New York, and working toward semikha at RIETS. His writing has appeared, or will be appearing, in Tradition, the Torah U-Madda Journal, and First Things magazine. “Two ships, both without a compass, are drifting on a night ...