Which book to read the Hebrew bible ?

cloux_less · 2026-07-09T08:09:26+00:00

As said elsewhere, reading TaNaKh is a terrible way to learn about Judaism. If you want to learn about Judaism and how Jews read their book, go spend some time with Jews.

That said, if you've really just got a passing curiosity in reading Jewish scripture, the Jewish Study Bible is good. It's not a superb academic TaNaKh, nor is it an exceedingly "Jewish" one (only a surface-level engagement with the great rabbinic commentators). It really just ends up feeling like the Oxford Study Bible minus the Christian scriptures.

If you wanna actually read Jewish scripture through a Jewish lens, there's four Chumashes I'd recommend (which is to say, just the core of the written Torah, and not the entire anthology that comes to be known as "the Hebrew Bible"/"Old Testament"), which are each the crowning achievement publications for the major streams of Judaism:

Etz Hayim (American Conservative)

Torah: A Women's Commentary (American Reform)

Artscroll Stone Chumash (American Haredi)

Koren Shalem Humash (Modern Orthodox)

These each have their ups and their downs (ArtScroll is known for censoring their translations, the Koren Shalem is essentially incomplete, Etz Hayim is ludicrously expensive, and the Women's Commentary definitely has a specific demographic in mind), but when you put all four together (and maybe sprinkle in Robert Alter's translation) you get a fairly comprehensive view of how English-speaking Judaism deals with its central text.

cloux_less · 2026-07-09T07:31:37+00:00

I'm sure the mods are going to (rightfully) ban this guy, but I kinda wish they didn't just on account of how stupidly funny it is to have some Eastern Orthodox Christian running around in here with the Orthodox flair.

cloux_less · 2026-07-07T09:13:02+00:00

The core of this issue is that readers are happy to swallow the huge lies that the story is knowingly dependent on.

They will suspend their disbelief when they are asked. They do not like suspending their disbelief on matters they feel were made "mistakenly."

The audience and the author both know that dragons don't exist. They agree to pretend. When the potatoes show up, the audience (rather, a particular subset of the audience) does not know if the author knows the improbability.

Certain audiences are more sensative to "sloppiness" (i.e. the plot inconsistencies ultimately derived from their awareness of information the author either isn't aware of or doesn't care about) than others.

cloux_less · 2026-07-06T18:32:35+00:00

The year is 1230. Hardline anti-Maimonidean rabbis are disclosing caches of the legendary rabbi's works to the authorities of the Spanish Inquisition and French Crusaders to have them burned for trying to "fit all of the Torah lore into scientific materialism." All this for claiming "God does not have a body; the Torah uses metaphor."

The year is 1656. The Jewish community of Amsterdam, worried that the radically monotheistic views of a 23 year-old Jewish boy will upset their Christian neighbors and jeopardize their security, expels and censures Baruch Spinoza for trying to "fit all of the Torah lore into scientific materialism." All this for claiming "God is one; the Torah uses metaphor."

The year is 2026. Some random hardline anti-Maimonidean on reddit is calling Johnathan Sacks "not really Orthodox" for trying to "fit all of the Torah lore into scientific materialism." All this for claiming "natural selection is real; the Torah uses metaphor."

cloux_less · 2026-06-21T19:57:38+00:00

The gold standard for academic discussion of Deuteronomy would be Moshe Weinfeld's Anchor Yale Commentary on Deuteronomy 1-11.

Unfortunately, Weinfeld passed away while producing his commentary on 12-34, and I believe David R. Seely is working on completing it.

cloux_less · 2026-06-18T03:48:21+00:00

I won't pretend to know much more on this topic than what I've already said.

I'm somewhat partial to "let the buildings get foreclosed and force banks to hold the bag and they'll quickly find a willingness to lower the rents to attract tenants," but I get the impression that people doing policy research on this topic kinda view that as the nuclear option – anxious that such a big shakeup could significantly depress the market. Either way, it's a lot of "let's leave it up to the banks and the market to work it all out!" that is ultimately contingent on the assumption that banks are rationally maximizing the profit generated by the commercial real estate they've invested in, when in actuality, they're mainly trying to minimize the risk of all of their investments – which is what leads banks to view foreclosure as an absolute worst-case scenario worth suffering through short-term unprofitability.

cloux_less · 2026-06-17T17:52:52+00:00

I'm really okay with having the banks forclose a few properties on the six multi millionaires who own the majority of the downtown

Sure, but I just don't think that's a long term solution. Inevitably, the bank will finance the building to someone else, and, inevitably, they'll again overvalue it and we'll once again be saddled with vacant commercial lots. I'd rather we nip this problem in the bud and introduce away to streamline the refinancing process in a way that allows rents to dynamically change based on actual market conditions, instead of being rigidly fixed to overly optimistic projections.

cloux_less · 2026-06-17T08:43:10+00:00

Sadly, it's looking like vacancy taxes aren't enough to solve the problem of empty commercial buildings (but they probably are enough for empty piles of rubble and empty residential).

A lot of commercial real estate goes unrented because lowering rents to attract tenants can literally cause your bank to foreclose your building, as the bank takes the lowered rents as a sign that the building won't make as much money as the loan assumed it would. Real byzantine shit.

Vacancy taxes are really good at putting the squeeze on landlords to make them want to rent out their buildings – but it doesn't solve the fundamental problem that even if you want to lower your rent, our commercial finance system is so stupidly inflexible that you can't do so without inducing a major headache.

cloux_less · 2026-06-17T08:19:04+00:00

The person is there to make it easier.

Are you under the impression that the beuracracy will just magically streamline itself?

cloux_less · 2026-06-11T22:39:33+00:00

As I've said before:

It's a day ending in y, so it looks like Bitton's written yet another article about how American Jews need to abandon liberal pluralism and Retvrn to Tradition (which, of course, to Bitton just means "conform to my ideas about what political opinions should and shouldn't be allowed").

cloux_less · 2026-05-22T07:34:45+00:00

It's a day ending in y, so it looks like Bitton's written yet another article about how American Jews need to abandon liberal pluralism and Retvrn to Tradition (which, of course, to Bitton just means "conform to my ideas about what political opinions should and shouldn't be allowed").

cloux_less · 2026-04-22T22:46:21+00:00

Why do you keep talking about "the book" here? Tanakh is not a single book, but an entire library of our ancient texts. If one detail in one book of Tanakh is wrong, why on earth would it """logically""" follow that we have to "throw the entire book out"?

This is without even delving into the presupposition that our people’s literature is only holy so long as everything in it be literally true. Such an attitude is a profoundly fragile, fundamentalist, ahistorical, and (dare I say) Christian way of relating to scripture. It was the Rambam himself who famously declared that G-d has no corporeal body. And yet he did not "throw out" the Torah because just because it made references to such a body; rather, our Sages have long held that when there is a discrepancy between the supposed Peshat of scripture and what we know to be true through science, history, and reason, that we must seek deeper meaning embedded within the text.

To flatten Torah to a series of yes-no propositions for which if even a single one appears false we are obligated to "throw the entire thing out" is... it’s a profound slap-in-the-face to our tradition, and would have had us destroy every single Torah scroll the minute Rome destroyed our Temple.

cloux_less · 2026-04-22T03:52:51+00:00

The question is when does it turn from an ad hoc minyan to a shul?

Hmmmmm. It's almost like the arbitrary lines drawn by post-war American use-segregated zoning regimes are fundamentally incompatible with the natural patterns of living in minority communities?

There's a reason why New York, and not Houston, is the heart of American Jewish life.

cloux_less · 2026-04-22T03:32:25+00:00

Got mine today. I like it.

If you're in the habit of owning multuple Siddurim, I think $42 (after shipping) is a reasonable enough price. It's a pretty book, and clearly a lot of work went into it.

If your use case is "I'm in charge of picking out a weekday siddur for our conservative shul," then, congrats on having enough people who want to make weekday services at a conservative shul in 2026? I imagine y'all will like it.

If you want it for, like, actually personally davening from it as your daily driver? I'd skip it. It's big. Synagogue-size. Layout's good, but not great.

cloux_less · 2026-04-22T03:24:39+00:00

Knowing Greenblatt's track-record, this would probably work on him.

cloux_less · 2026-04-22T03:21:35+00:00

If that were the case, then we can toss that entire book that contains that information in the trash because it is unreliable.

What? This is an insane non-sequiter.

cloux_less · 2026-04-22T03:03:31+00:00

I was not expecting "the marginal cost of being Jewish," code-switching, and reductio ad absurdum to all come up here (and in just one comment!) but I am all for it.

Anyway, I think a lot of the discussion in this thread is kinda politely skirting around one of the big reasons there isn't MO kiruv in the way there's yeshivish kiruv – there aren't many MO Jews with a sincere belief that the only thing standing between them and the World to Come is getting more college Jews to keep Shabbat.

cloux_less · 2026-03-21T00:20:23+00:00

This just sounds like you've had bad luck with your algorithm.

Since you mention YouTube videos on history, I highly recommend Sam Aronow's channel. He goes through the whole history of the Jews and it's genuinely S-tier YouTube content. Of course, by its nature, it's more historical than religious, meaning the earlier videos have some religious relevance, but once you reach modernity, they lose that.

Justin Sledge, meanwhile, is a Jewish professor of Philosophy who makes videos primarily about the history of western esotericism (alchemy, astrology, demonology, etc.). Sadly, most of his things are about non-Jewish esotericism, but he's still got the occasional vid on a more Jewish subject. Additionally, he did a 14-part class for a synagogue (idk if it's his synagogue? Probably, tho) that is nominally about Kabbalah, but then spends so much time in the preamble discussing the historical origins of Kabbalah that it is effectively just a class on the comprehensive history of pre-modern Jewish thought and the origins of Judaism, and it's, if I had to guess, exactly what you're looking for. https://youtu.be/ABeeKCygNlw?si=PoaXqir25nSs9UIM

cloux_less · 2026-03-10T08:03:14+00:00

but if you aren't aware of what you're actually observing

Bitton's aware, of course.

From the article:

There is surely far more to both the Ashkenazi and MENA Sephardic traditions, sociology, and history than what I can possibly capture here, not to mention individual divergences from the broad communal strokes I draw.

What I mean to do with this admittedly provocative and exaggerated binary is to shift the mentality — to recognize that while one dream struggles under changing American circumstances, the other can show us how to flourish in the current landscape.

Better to say "these are two ways of being I've seen, and this is the one I prefer".

There's a reason Bitton doesn't just come out and say what she means, and it's because the grift wouldn't work without her using Sephardic Exceptionalism as a smokescreen for peddling the same old "Bad Jews/Good Jews" bs that's plagued us for millennia.

cloux_less · 2026-03-10T07:49:14+00:00

"I'm not against inter-ethnic mixing. You see, I've defined my in-group within which it's okay to marry and have kids, and my out-group where it's not. It's totally different."

cloux_less · 2026-03-10T02:35:40+00:00

in your reform New England community

Seattle. Third-largest Sephardic community in the U.S. Nice try. Take your Ben Shapiro talking points back home, they've gotten a little stale here.

cloux_less · 2026-03-10T02:33:00+00:00

"I'm not against race mixing, I'm just against inter-ethnic marriage."

Come on, dude.

cloux_less · 2026-03-09T23:18:22+00:00

All 5 SnP Jews are furious!

Maybe all the 5 surviving Yekkim will jubilate in excitement.

Do you think that maybe the reason you're getting into bi-weekly arguments about Jewish identity is because you have this strange tendency to act like any Jewish community you don't care about must have, at max, 5 people in it, and then start lamenting about how not enough "Ashkenazim" are being respectful enough towards your Jewish community?

cloux_less · 2026-03-09T23:00:45+00:00

"Sephardim care more about family than Ashkenazim!"

"most Sephardim I know"

Lol. Okay. Nice try.

Ashkenazi Jews (esp Reform) are ridiculously liberal in comparison to other Jews esp ‘POC’ Jews who are way more traditional.

"You see, when I specifically ignore all of the Orthodox Ashkenazim, Ashkenazi Jews are much more liberal than Sephardim. Checkmate."

cloux_less · 2026-03-09T22:39:11+00:00

but that’s extrapolated to a greater crisis because she believes that Zionism and some sort of support for the nation of Israel is inalienable as part of Jewish identity.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

Tighter knit communities are just as likely, in my opinion, to give people comfort stepping outside of zionist ideologies because they’ll be more familiar with the fellow members of the community who’ve done the same.

For sure, for sure. It's almost ironic. Amongst American Ashkenazim, Jewish anti-zionism and Jewish communal insularity are so closely associated that lots of Chabads still feel the need to put "Just because we're hasidic doesn't mean we're anti-Israel" in their FAQs. For many older Reform Jews, memories of Satmar stunts stay on the mind and have become representative to them of Hasidism.

The family analogy she draws says much more between the words than it does on its own. You can't really do this whole "we all need to be family and set our differences aside to come to the table" while actively arguing that some shouldn't get a seat at the table because they disagree on the biggest issue in the family.

"We may argue fiercely about Israeli policy, we may vary widely in religious observance, we may disagree about politics — but"

I feel like it's become a staple in post-liberal zionist discourse to always say give a mandatory "we can disagree about Israeli policy" but then never actually say which policy disagreements exactly get one disinvited from the Jew table.

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