Shael Siegel

Thank you for visiting my site. Jewish values have always guided my thinking. What complicates the process of distilling those values is interpretation of our sacred text. One of the great masters, my teacher, Prof. Eliezer Berkovits, struggled with this his entire life. In one of his seminal works, he concluded that

"...not only does the method of Authority not work, it actually defeats the eternal validity of the Torah. The Torah is eternal because it has a Word for each generation... If they have the authority they impose the Word meant for yesterday and thus miss hearing the Word for today, for this generation, for this new hour in the history of the Jewish people..."

These powerful words launched me on a lifelong odyssey of listening and learning, in search of the Word.