Rabbi Roy Feldman

Whither Humanity? Becoming More Human in an Artificial Age High Holy Days Sermon 5787* Recently, I found myself going back and forth over email with someone who had asked me a halachic question. I answered, he pushed back, I clarified, and still we were not quite getting anywhere. So, I pasted the entire exchange into ChatGPT. What came back was unsettlingly familiar. It drew on arguments I had made elsewhere, reflected ideas I had written about before, and somehow sounded like me.  I thought to myself, This is an answer that I could have written . If a machine can know what I know, reason the way I reason, and even write in my voice, what, pray tell, is left for me to do?! For centuries, extraordinary knowledge and memory were considered the greatest achievements of the human mind. The Vilna Gaon, the great 18th-century Talmudic scholar, believed that a serious student of Torah should know at least one tractate by heart. One of his students proudly told him that he had mastered al...

Each Rosh Hashanah, Manhattan Jews face a geographical dilemma: where is the best place to do Tashlich ? Should West Siders head to the Hudson and East Siders go to the East River? Does the Central Park Reservoir count, or even a pond in Central Park? What about one of the many fountains throughout the city? Before ranking Manhattan’s bodies of water, however, it is worth stating that fundamentally, it really does not matter that much. Tashlich is a custom, not a mitzvah obligation. A person who heard the shofar, prayed, ate the festive meals, but never made it to a body of water has not failed to fulfill some essential obligation of Rosh Hashanah. In fact, Tashlich is a somewhat strange custom. Surely nobody believes that our sins are literally sitting in our pockets, waiting to be shaken out into the River. The water does not carry away our transgressions, and reciting the Tashlich liturgy is not a substitute for real teshuva . Tashlich is symbolic. We spend Rosh Hashanah praying, re...

In this series, I will address some halakhic issues that arise when living in Manhattan. They are certainly also relevant in other areas! This is probably the most common Shabbat question for those of us who live in New York City apartment buildings: May I ask the doorman to press the elevator button for me on Shabbat? The starting point is that we generally may not ask a non-Jew to perform prohibited activity for us on Shabbat. This prohibition, known as amira l’nochri , is itself rabbinic. But there is a relevant exception. One may ask a non-Jew to perform an action that is itself prohibited only rabbinically when there is a mitzvah need, some degree of illness or distress, or some other significant need. We call this shvut d’shvut : one rabbinic prohibition layered on top of another. The act itself is only rabbinically prohibited, and asking the non-Jew to do it is another rabbinic prohibition. In certain circumstances, the Sages did not impose both layers of restriction (See Shulch...

I finished the first draft of my Rosh Hashanah sermon unusually early this year, thanks, improbably enough, to a car dealership.  I had been thinking about the sermon for a while and had the basic ideas in mind, but I had not yet worked out the argument and structure or actually begun writing it. And then, last week I brought my car in for its New York State inspection, an oil change, and a few recall repairs. They told me it would take two and a half hours, so I brought my laptop. There was a waiting area, coffee and snacks, and I figured I would get a little work done. Six hours later, my car was finally ready. And so was the first draft of my sermon. Since then, I have been pondering why I was able to accomplish so much there. There was nothing particularly inspiring about the surroundings. But I couldn't go anywhere. No one was going to knock on my office door. There were none of the many small tasks that would normally compete for attention. I had one large piece of work to do...

If you describe someone in Modern Hebrew as tamim , it is no compliment. It means he is naïve, unsophisticated, maybe little too trusting. If your friend is about to fall for an obvious scam, you might tell him: אל תהיה תמים. Don’t be so gullible. Yet, throughout the Bible, tamim is an extraordinarily positive word. Noach is introduced as: נֹחַ אִישׁ צַדִּיק תָּמִים הָיָה בְּדֹרֹתָיו “Noach was a righteous man; he was tamim in his generation.” God tells Avraham: הִתְהַלֵּךְ לְפָנַי וֶהְיֵה תָמִים “Walk before Me and be tamim .” Tehillim describes the person worthy of dwelling in God’s presence as: הוֹלֵךְ תָּמִים וּפֹעֵל צֶדֶק “One who walks tamim and acts righteously.” And in Parashat Shoftim , the Torah commands us directly: תָּמִים תִּהְיֶה עִם ה׳ אֱלֹקֶיךָ “You shall be tamim with the Lord your God.” So what exactly is temimut , often translated as “completeness” or “wholeheartedness”? What is this quality that sounds almost insulting to the modern ear, but which the Torah cons...

Twenty years ago, I was sitting in a college history lecture when my mother called me on my cell phone. I didn’t pick up, but she rang again and again. I eventually left the classroom to take the call. My father had a stroke while eating lunch - likely at Diamond Dairy - and Hatzolah took him to the Roosevelt Hospital Emergency room. I was the only member of the family in Manhattan, so I hopped on the train and went right to be with him. At that time I was not a regular tefillin-wrapper or minyan-goer, but that night I decided I wanted to daven for his health, and the next morning went to the campus Shacharit minyan with my tefillin. I don’t understand how God operates or whether my prayers contributed to my father’s recovery. But I do know that this act of wrapping leather straps around my arm - something that by any account is a chok, a statute that we don’t understand, somehow this act was deeply meaningful to me.   The beginning of our parsha talks about the laws of t...