糖心出品

JTS High Holiday Webinars 2026

Join 糖心出品 this August for a special webinar series to help prepare for the Days of Awe. Through conversations with JTS scholars, we will explore themes that shape the High Holiday season, including fear and resilience, prayer and liturgy, and the enduring wisdom of Jewish texts and traditions. These sessions will offer fresh perspectives, thoughtful reflection, and practical insights to help deepen your experience of the High Holidays.

Motivations for Storytelling

By Paula Mack Drill | Devarim

When our family gathers for celebrations, one refrain consistently punctuates every conversation: 鈥淭hat鈥檚 not the way it happened!鈥� One of my adult children will then retell the story of how my youngest鈥檚 wrist was broken or the first time one of the daughters-in-law came for Shabbat dinner. Everyone has a different motivation for shaping our iconic family stories according to their own remembrance 鈥� to make themselves the heroes (or at least less culpable) or to uplift a favorite way of recalling the incident.

Stranger still is the way I find myself telling old stories in a great variety of ways depending on my emotions or my audience in the moment. I might be the victim or the hero; sometimes in the telling, 鈥淚 was shocked鈥� or 鈥淚 knew all along鈥�! Memory is a tricky thing.

So it seems to be with Moshe here in Devarim, as he recalls what happened when the tribal leaders were sent to reconnoiter the land; an event we first learned about back in Parashat Shelah Lekha in the Book of Bemidbar. It is fair to assume that the all-knowing narrator in Bemidbar was sharing an account of what happened close in time to the event, and Moshe is now remembering it in Devarim at a later time, as an iconic story of his own.聽If we try to imagine Moshe鈥檚 motivation (conscious or unconscious) for telling the story in the way that he does, we can begin to understand why he says (and doesn’t say) the things he does.

Your People Shall Be My People: Conversion to Judaism through the Centuries

By Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary

January 22鈥揂ugust 3, 2026 Throughout Jewish history, from biblical times to the present, non-Jews have joined the Jewish people. How they have done so, however, has differed greatly from one historical context to another. Changing conditions of Jewish life have led to striking variations both in the motivations of converts and in the requirements for […]