Judaism for the Thinking Person
Scholarly, Compassionate, and Practical Jewish Teachings on God, Prayer, Torah and Kabbalah with Rabbi Nadav Caine (ravnadav)
Episodes
My Kol Nidrei 2025 Sermon on how our phones are amplifying the centrifugal force of the pull of our individual lives, sacrificing the centripetal force of community, by holding out a fake community, a false version of ourselves (the shadow masquerading as the soul), and building Temples for us to worship the A.I. gods.
This is a revision of a podcast I released several years ago. It focuses on Isaac as the patriarch of Imposter Syndrome. In my own life, I've come to make peace with my own Imposter Syndrome, seeing the anxiety I must live with as a gift that leads me not to shame, but to service. It has made me appreciate Isaac enormously.
I relate the debate from Bereishit Rabbah to This American Life episode 550.
Most of us have been avoiding the painful conversations with friends and family over Gaza. Why? It seems like we have no common frame of reference, and so it hardly seems worth it. In this Rosh Hashanah sermon, I do something a little bizarre: I use Judaism's main halakhic code about war -- Maimonides' codification of all the Torah's statements on war-- to illuminate the war we are at with ourselves. My hope is that it opens us all...
Miracle may be the most misunderstood concept in Judaism. While some Jewish sects officially (like Chabad), and most Jews unofficially, construe "miracles" as supernatural interventions in the nature, as in Christianity, the Jewish tradition tends to understand the word "miracle" (in Biblical Hebrew: "nes") in a far more subtle way. In this sermon, I explain the true meaning of "nes" as "sign" or "that which is risen above the ordi...
In this long section of the Torah, where Miriam and Aaron are disciplined by God for challenging Moses, where Moses tries yet again to resign his leadership, where the 70 Elders to help Moshe go ahead and prophesy, but strangely nothing seems to come from it, I am struck by how much the parashah speaks to our time, where the strangest of leaders are getting elected. We learn from Torah that leadership is not just about being prophe...
Rabbi Irwin Kula reminds us that when we engage deeply with Torah, it can serve "as our mirror" which illuminates our inner complexities, strivings, horizon of significance, so we can better understand ourselves, others, and the world. In this presentation, I note how the Biblical story of Pinchas (who gets his own name on a parashah!) is a little different than most Biblical narratives in that most generate debates that quote text...
We have grown accustomed to seeing Ethics and Holiness as virtually the same thing. I show that in order to properly understand Heschel's interlocking concepts of Blessing (berakhah), Faith (emunah), Awe (yirah), and Commandedness (Mitzvah), one needs to grasp that Ethics and Holiness are VERY different. This podcast has been edited to remove the Q&A, which sometimes found the material uncomfortable to their sensibilities.
The vast majority of work on Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel is academic: summaries, clarification, footnotes and so on. In this series of classes, I'm here to show you how to live Heschel's religious philosophy, not understand it. In this first lecture, I show how one begins this process by first gathering three philosophies: 1) Schleiermacher, 2) Pragmatism, and 3) Phenomenology. With these basics, one is ready to identify what con...
There are two New Years on the Jewish calendar (in addition to the new years for trees and for flocks): Rosh Hashanah and First of Nissan (announced on Shabbat HaChodesh). The deep spiritual connection between the two is emphasized by reading the haftarah from Ezekiel, who sees the journey from the 1st of Nissan to Pesach as an equal mirror of the journey from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, and for whom Pesach is the real Yom Kippur....
We often fail to appreciate the virtues of the Shepherd period of Judaism, which preceded the Israelite period. In this dvar Torah, I focus on the virtues of sustainability and repairability of the portable sanctuary (Mishkan) over the permanent version (Temple), and I apply it to legislation before state congresses today.
If you want to understand the crisis in education, look no further than Natalie Wexler's "The Knowledge Gap," one of the most important books of the past ten years. Is reading a skill you apply to any text, like stretching a muscle, or playing a video game, or is it, as our tradition defines it, something entirely different, something based on knowledge of the world, of life, and of relating to a larger story?
The plain sense of the brief Tower of Babel story is that dividing people up by their own languages is a curse that prevents cooperation (even if the Rabbis read the story differently). Using Coleman Hughes's essay on the Civil Rights hero Bayard Rustin, I wonder if the curse of our times is the identiy-based division of truths: is this modern paradigm a blessing of diversity or a curse for our much needed cooperation in solving ou...
Using the text of Genesis chapter 24, Talmud Bavli Ketubot 82b, and the Conservative Movement responsum by Rabbi Pamela Barmash, I try to correct the pervasive misunderstings around the Jewish wedding ceremonies: Does arranged marriage (historically and today) exclude female consent? Is the Jewish wedding ceremony one of male acquisition of a female? Is the ketubah a wedding document or a prenuptial agreement that protects the bri...
How do the ideals of progressivism become the idols of antisemitism? As a rabbi in one of the most progressive cities in America, I try to understand this phenomenon through scapegoat theory and through my own heartbreaking experiences. So what do we tell our college students? How do we heal instead of hurt? How do we get to the Thou? (Sermon, Yom Kippur 2024/5785)
As a Conservative rabbi in one of the most progressive cities in America, it's been an incredibly painful year of feeling unable to ask for empathy from my own fellow Jews, as I see this year's events as Good vs Evil, and so many of my congregants want me to be condemning Israel while declaring moral equivalencies. And I know they, too, need from me what I cannot give them: validation for their perspective. This sermon is my way ...
This dvar Torah uses the amazing article by Rabbi David Golinkin on the history of the halakhah and the practice. It can be found at: https://schechter.edu/must-gods-name-be-written-in-english-as-g-d/
It is commonplace to hear today's Israel-Arab Conflict portrayed as an example of Settler-Colonial European Jews settling in the nation-state of indigenous-dwelling Palestinians. This is a modern invention and is not how the conflict was understood by local Arabs a hundred years ago, who did so in rational terms that match the Biblical arguments between the Israelites (Gideonites) and local Ammonites in Judges chapters 10 and 11. U...
As Purim became a holiday of tremendous festivities and lightheartedness, the Rabbis knew that the end of the Megillah in Chapter 9 has a dubious quality, that of a massacre on Haman's people. Is this a happy ending, a desirable ending, that of massacre, that of Jews finally (and really for its time, only possible in the Jewish imagination but not in practice) having power? So the Rabbis created a requirement that on the Shabbat ...
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