The Torah Ark of Arthur Szyk

the tragedy of modern man in arthur millers world

what miller wants is a theatre of heightened consciousness. he speaks of two passions in a man, the passion to "feel" and the passion "know". he belives that we can have more of the latter. he says: drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us know more and not merely to spend our feelings. the writing of the crucible shows us that he is trying to give more heightene...

From Ark of the Covenant to Torah Scroll: Ritualizing Israel’s Iconic Texts

Who Wrote the Torah

The issue of the authorship of the Torah is important for at least this one reason: since the book claims to have been written by a certain writer, it is simply a matter of integrity that that claim is verified. If this claim to authorship is not substantiated, then why should we trust what that book says? In short, if the Torah claims to be written by Moshe, and we find that it is, in fact, no...

The Torah code controversy

In this paper we briefly explain what a Torah code is and give an example of one. We show how to calculate the probability of its occurrence in a suitably defined population of texts. We explain how it is possible to misadvertise the computed probabilities, making it seem that the probability of a Torah code is very small. We briefly discuss the controversy and suggest that new more carefully c...

The Noah's Ark Problem

This paper is about the economic theory of biodiversity preservation. A cost-effectiveness methodology is constructed, which results in a particular formula that can be used as a criterion to rank projects. The ranking criterion is sufficiently operational to be useful in suggesting what to look at when determining actual conservation priorities among endangered species. At the same time, the f...