Essays

A scientist bet a philosopher that we would uncover the mechanism of consciousness in the brain. He lost. As a student of Chabad, I'm hoping he will win this time around. Here's why.

Religion is often accused of explaining a scientific discovery after the fact. But the record on how the universe came to be presents a different sequence of events.

It is not easy to understand how a world view that leads nowhere and ultimately explains nothing became so rooted in the human psyche

For millennia we were ridiculed for believing that the world began, cause and effect are not inherently linked, a whole is greater than the sum of its parts, the human psyche is multi-layered...

"Religion is an attempt to understand the purpose and meaning of our universe. Science is an attempt to understand how our universe works. Well, if there's a purpose and meaning, that must have something to do with how it works..."

"I know all about astronomy," insisted the rabbi. "Tvinkle, tvinkle little stah."

The debate continues, but the debaters have changed

Imagine if you could turn your very worst liabilities into your most precious assets--using both cutting edge science and state-of-the-art religion, i.e., Judaism

"Every single item in the general doctrine is denied, but the conclusions from the doctrine as a whole are retained. The result is a complete muddle in the scientific thought, in philosophic cosmology and in epistemology..."

One might reasonably suppose that since oxen and pits are facts of life, the Torah must implement laws to govern their many possible interactions. In fact, the situation is just the reverse . . .

There are at least four varieties of ignorance (passive ignorance, active ignorance, essential ignorance, and enlightened ignorance) two of which are beneficial; one of these actually supersedes knowledge

In several letters and talks of the Rebbe we find hints to a fascinating convergence of traditional Jewish thought, Halachah and quantum physics, providing a vision of the place of the human being within the cosmic creative process.

In the wondrous realm of subatomic reality, elementary particles move backward in time, leaving "footprints" that are experimentally observable. Thus, the force of tikkun--of negative-entropy--can be discerned in the infinitely small...

On closer inspection, it seems more akin to ecology than to ethical monotheism... yet this one elegant idea developed by a child some 3,800 years ago, has transformed the world forever

From The Man and the Century: A Biography of Ideas--a timeline biography of the Rebbe

The utility of plowing and sowing is a matter of experience: countless generations of farmers have sown and profited from their toil. Yet the Talmud insists that farming is an act of faith

How the technological advances of recent times are connected to approach of the Messianic Era

Is Torah really absolute, all-encompassing Truth? Do the rabbis never disagree? Could we have invented Teflon™ and Superglue™ just by reading Torah?

Sixty-seven different steps have to happen in sequence so that a newborn infant can go from a creature that lives in water to an oxygen-breathing baby. If a company tried to build it, it wouldn’t work

What do Pascal's Triangle, the Golden Proportion, bee populations, flower pedals, pine cone spirals, and the hexagonal-shaped scales in the pineapple have in common?

At first it feels strange, but within 20 minutes, patients learn to completely substitute the flesh stimulation for eyesight, and the visual cortex of the brain is harnessed to process these tactile sensations…

In the middle of this lab session, as literally hundreds of undergraduate students like me were racing against the clock, I was summoned to the side by one of the dozens of supervisors...

At least ninety percent of Americans pray every day, asking and thanking their Maker for blessings of health, wealth and peace of mind. But what would happen, asked psychologist Nathaniel Lambert of Florida State University, if we focused our prayers on the people that make us mad?

One November Shabbat afternoon in 1703, Rabbi Nieto stood on the podium in the grand Bevis Marks Synagogue and addressed the congregation. “There is no such thing as nature,” he lectured them. “The word simply does not exist in the Hebrew language.”

Quantum logic helps explain a halachic ruling of Maimonides, a puzzling story of the Talmud, a Midrash about the splitting of the Sea of Reeds, and a rabbinic teaching about the relationship between Torah and existence.