Over the course of my life I have heard many definitions of what it means to be Jewish. There are those who say it is an ethnicity, others a culture, still others who contend that it can only be a religious philosophy. Frankly, I don't think that any of these designations are entirely accurate. By the same token, I think it's important that we do come to an understanding of just what Judaism or the Jewish life is. I would like to submit, however humbly and inadequately given the limits of this blog, that Judaism is best defined as a civilization.

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Shabbat Shalom and welcome to Judeo Talk. The Torah portion for this week is Parsha Ri'eh, Deuteronomy 11:26-16:17.

If ever a scholar needed a quick and dirty reference text for kosher law, Ri'eh is it. As is the trend in Deuteronomy, much of this parsha is a recap of various related rules, morals and ordinances. It discusses what may and may not be eaten, how people may and may not worship and what separates a bondsman from a free man.

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Since the early 1980's the most prominent figure of modern sexual psychology has improbably been a short, sweet and often grandmotherly woman named Karola Ruth Westheimer. Most of us know her better as Dr. Ruth. Her frank, thoughtful approach to human sexual relationships now comes with the label "Sex-Positive Culture" and any modern psychologist worth his or her salt is familiar with it. What a lot of people don't know is that the gentle old lady who gives good-natured sex advice is also a dedicated Zionist and a war hero.

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Shabbat Shalom and welcome to Judeo Talk. The Torah portion for this week is Parsha Eikev, Deuteronomy 7:12-11:25.

Many figures of speech and famous phrases have a biblical origin. Phrases like "An eye for an eye" come directly out of the Torah and have come to have meaning in just about every language spoken by people who follow Abrahamic faiths. But not all poetic turns of phrase from the Torah made it into the modern age. Eikev is interesting in that contains two lines that are meant to be powerful figures of speech but only one of them has survived into modern parlance. It's not difficult to see why considering the context of one of them.

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I've been hesitant to feature Albert Einstein in the Person of the Week column for two reasons. First, Einstein is such a well-known figure and so much has been written about him already that much of what I would write has already undergone a much more thorough analysis than I could offer here. The other reason I've avoided featuring Einstein is because there is some question, however ill-informed, about the degree of his devotion to Judaism. It is that point I would like to address in this column.

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Shabbat Shalom and welcome to Judeo Talk. The Torah portion for this week is Parsha Va'etchanan, Deuteronomy 3:23-7:11.

I frequently refer to certain parshiot as being "loaded", that is, containing an unusually high density of extremely interesting, important information. Va'etchanan, in that regard, is half-loaded. Much of Deuteronomy is concerned with recounting the history of the Israelites and reiterating the most important laws. In a sense, it's a kind of Cliff's Notes version of the Torah after Genesis. Mixed in with this civics lesson are several key passages, some that were intended to stand out and others that came to stand out thanks to the rabbinical construction of the standard liturgy.

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Last week's Person of the Week was Gloria Steinem and while I didn't have the space to talk about the subject of Judaism and its view of women very much in that article, I'd like to address that topic in depth today. While there is no doubt that ancient Judaism was, like every culture of the time, quite misogynistic, it is incorrect to assume that the much more egalitarian views of the modern Progressive movement are merely reactions to similar trends in the secular world. Not only is a non-sexist application of Judaism more palatable to 21st century society, it is also philosophically sound within the faith regardless of era.

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Shabbat Shalom and welcome to Judeo Talk. The Torah portion for this week is Parsha Devarim, Deuteronomy 1:1-3:22.

We've hit the home stretch. This week we begin Devarim, the book of Deuteronomy, the conclusion of the Five Books of Moses. Much of this book takes the form of Moses speaking directly to the Israelites just days before they are to enter to the Promised Land and officially make their nation. Parsha Devarim takes place in year 40, month 11, essentially zero hour. The people have been in the wilderness staving off starvation, dehydration, plague and war since they left Egypt a full generation prior. At this time, Moses stands before them and reviews their recent history.

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Judaism, among all Abrahamic faiths, pays particular attention to the iconic women in its scriptures and history. While biblical texts can hardly be called non-sexist in even the loosest modern context, the stories of the Torah are downright radical for their time concerning social issues. It should come as no surprise, then, that Jewish women have stood at the forefront of political progress throughout history. Many of the most important individuals in thought and in action during the major strides in civil rights in the 20th century were Jewish women. Of them all, none are as famous or as overtly influential as Gloria Steinem.

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Shabbat Shalom and welcome to Judeo Talk. The Torah Portion for this week is Parsha Matot-Masei, Numbers 30:2-36:13.

The key to understanding any Torah portion is to find the overarching theme of the narrative. As I have often pointed out, the seemingly random collection of stories and codified laws in a given portion almost always relate to one another thematically. Though there is no hard and fast form for a parsha, one of the more common conventions is to place a general rule at the beginning, followed by a much larger socio-political application of that rule. The two understandings of a mitzvah, the micro and the macro, act as concurrent, counter-balancing metaphors for one another.

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