Ben Harris
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Articles by Ben Harris
The timing of the impending crude crisis
Editor's note: This article was amended on May 25, 2026, to clarify daily production volumes of crude and refined product. The shortfall in global oil supply due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has roiled markets and prompted discussions of a global recession.
TransAlta Appoints Mike Politeski as Chief Financial Officer and Grant Arnold as Chief Commercial Officer
TransAlta Corporation (TransAlta or the Company) (TSX: TA) (NYSE: TAC) is pleased to announce the appointment of Mike Politeski as Executive Vice President, Finance and Chief Financial Officer (EVP and CFO) and Grant Arnold as Executive Vice President, Growth and Chief Commercial Officer (EVP and CCO), effective May 1, 2026 and May 6, 2026, respectively.
The Unfolding Now
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Reading the newspaper yesterday, I found myself recalling a line from The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, Lily Tomlin’s 1985 one-woman stage show. After reciting a litany of anxieties, she says: “I worry no matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up.” The world we are living in is changing in unpredictable ways — or in predictably discouraging ways — so some cynicism seems warranted.
Redemption Songs
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... In the Jewish calendar, the month of Adar, the month of Purim, marks the transition from the darkness of winter to the spring redemption story that is enacted on the holidays of Passover and Shavuot. This is expressed in the four unique Torah readings of this period, which all address different aspects of preparing for Passover. It may also be behind the well-known rabbinic teaching (Taanit 29a) that when Adar begins, we increase our joy.
Jazz Kabbalah | My Jewish Learning
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... The Saba de-Mishpatim — The Old Man in the [Torah portion] Mishpatim — is one of the Zohar’s most famous narratives. At first, it looks like a colorful detour. But in fact, it is a meditation on how mystical insight actually enters the world. The scene opens in a tower in Tyre. Two of the Zohar’s sages, Rabbi Hiyya and Rabbi Yose, are meeting, but Rabbi Yose is irritated.
Flowing Like Tree Sap
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... The literary forms of the Zohar are as much a part of its teaching as its content. One example of this would be the way it often employs multiple metaphors in a single passage, blurring the boundaries between them until the reader is no longer sure which image belongs to which metaphor and where the metaphor ends and the actual matter it is describing begins. Which is exactly the point.
The Voice That Never Ceased
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Parashat Yitro includes the first description of the Israelite people receiving the Torah at Mount Sinai directly from God. But the extent of that revelation has been debated ever since.
Sabbath of Coins
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... This Shabbat is known as Shabbat Shekalim, the Sabbath of Coins. Observed at the new moon of Adar, it is the first of four special sabbaths marked annually in the run up to Passover. This week, an additional reading will be added to the Shabbat Torah service: Exodus 30:11-16, which describes the requirement for all Israelite men aged 20-60 to donate a half shekel to the community shrine.
Would You Know My Name?
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... In the aftermath of the death of his young son Conor, Eric Clapton wrote “Tears in Heaven,” one of the most poignant and heartbreaking meditations on loss in the modern canon. Written in the fraught space between faith and grief, the song gives voice to a primordial human desire to soften the finality of death by asking if we will be recognized by our loved ones when we see them again in heaven.
Cleaving to God Through Song
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... At the center of Parashat Beshalach stands the Song of the Sea, a hymn of praise sung by the Israelites after safely crossing the Red Sea that has been incorporated into the liturgy as part of the daily prayer service. Song is also central to the Haftarah that accompanies this portion, which features the Song of Deborah, a poem from Judges 5 sung after the defeat of the Canaanites.
Torah is Pedagogy
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... The Torah commands animal sacrifice, and in painstaking detail — which animals, which altars, which procedures. Yet the prophets seem to dismiss the whole enterprise. Hosea declares: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.” (Hosea 6:6) Isaiah is harsher: “To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices to me?
The Danger of Anger
In the annual cycle of Jewish observances commemorating the destruction of the First Temple, the fast of the Tenth of Tevet marks the earliest point of the narrative. According to biblical tradition (Ezekiel 24:1), this is the day the siege began that led to the destruction of Jerusalem and the burning of the Temple seven months later.
The Garment of Days
Parashat Vayechi opens with Jacob on his deathbed. “The days of Israel drew near to die,” reads the verse in Genesis 47:29. On its face, this verse seems simply to report that Jacob (renamed Israel after wrestling with the angel) was nearing the end of his life. But the Zohar reads this verse in a very unusual way, what I would call hyperliterally, and in doing so fashions a profound meditation on the meaning of life.
Zevachim 113 | My Jewish Learning
I have always pictured the flood of Noah’s generation sweeping the entire world. The text in Genesis 6–7, not to mention every picture book on the subject, seems unambiguous on this point. But on today’s daf, Rabbi Yohanan argues passionately, and at length, that the land of Israel was spared the deluge. His beloved study partner, Reish Lakish, is equally passionate in his defense of the more traditional view.
The Menorah Comes Home
One of the striking features of Hanukkah is how little is said about it in classic Jewish texts. Though it is among the most widely and publicly celebrated Jewish holidays today, there are only a handful of passages in the Zohar about it. Yet those that do exist open a window on to a profound reconfiguration of the menorah into a symbol whose locus of meaning migrates steadily inward.
Uncovering the Wells
This week’s Torah portion, Parashat Toldot, is grounded in the recurrent motif of wells, of reopening intergenerational connections, of unearthing the life-sustaining force of water in the desert and the moments of transformative encounter that take place at those wells. Early in the portion we learn that the Philistines blocked the wells that Abraham’s servants had dug. In the following chapter, Isaac digs those wells anew and gave them the same names as his father.
Queen Jezebel | My Jewish Learning
Jezebel was a Phoenician woman who became queen of Israel upon her marriage to King Ahab in the ninth century BCE. Much of what we know of her is from a series of unflattering biblical stories that portray her as evil and a whore. Indeed, her reputation is sullied to such an extent that her very name remains shorthand for licentiousness and manipulation to this day. (“Get in the box, you Jezebel,” Will Farrell’s character orders in the Barbie movie.) But was Jezebel really so bad?
Zevachim 80 | My Jewish Learning
A friend who sits a few rows behind me in synagogue and is a regular reader of the Daily Dose asked me recently: Is all this really necessary? It’s a reasonable question. The conversation in Tractate Zevachim is laser focused on the minutia of the sacrificial system, and the potential ways it can go wrong, at a level of detail that can feel a bit over the top. My friend’s question is one that many of us have been asking of late.
Young Wallander Complete S01-S02 1080p WEBRip 10Bit DDP5 1 HEVC-d3g
Young Wallander S02 Pack Versions: 11.7GB Campfire Cooking in Another World with My Absurd Skill S02E09 Versions: 82MB 200MB 1.4GB Indéfendable S04E46 Versions: 78MB 252MB 556MB Our Golden Days S01E12 Versions: 246MB 250MB 285MB 397MB 613MB 727MB 2.5GB Indéfendable S04E49 Versions: 74MB 239MB 558MB Indéfendable S04E45 Versions: 78MB 248MB 558MB Indéfendable S04E47 Versions: 75MB 240MB 558MB Nice to Not Meet You S01E10 Versions: 227MB 227MB 228MB 228MB 256MB 256MB 328MB 328MB 544MB 544MB 1.6GB...
Psalm 81: Honey From the Rock
Psalm 81, the psalm for Thursday, begins: “Sing aloud to God our strength; raise a shout to the God of Jacob.” According to the Talmud, this psalm is recited on Thursday because the fifth day of the week corresponds to the fifth day of creation, when God created birds and fish. Like the new life bursting forth into the skies and the oceans, Psalm 81 also opens with noise, with joyous singing and a shout to God.
Psalm 94: Holy Protest
Psalm 94 is not a quiet prayer. It is a storm of words that dares to demand justice from the very Source of justice. “God of vengeance, appear,” the psalmist cries in the opening verse. This is no meek whisper. It is the voice of the brokenhearted who still believe. With all its intensity, this psalm was chosen by our ancestors to be part of the sacred rhythm of Jewish prayer.
Zevachim 51 | My Jewish Learning
The current chapter of Tractate Zevachim is concerned with the procedural details for each major category of sacrifice — details like where in the Temple a sacrifice is slaughtered, where its blood is collected, where and how the blood must be sprinkled, where the remainder of the blood is poured, and details about how it is eaten and/or burned.
Arthur Waskow, activist rabbi who brought Jewish spiritual wisdom to bear on progressive politics, dies at 92
Rabbi Arthur Waskow, an activist and author of more than two dozen books that refracted progressive causes like civil rights, economic injustice and, most pressingly in his last decade, climate change through the lens of Jewish text and tradition, died Oct. 20 at his home in Philadelphia. He was 92. Rabbi Waskow became one of the leading voices bringing Jewish spiritual wisdom to bear on the progressive political agenda.
Rabbi Arthur Waskow, longtime progressive US activist and author, dies at 92
JTA — Rabbi Arthur Waskow, an activist and author of more than two dozen books that refracted progressive causes like civil rights, economic injustice and, most pressingly in his last decade, climate change through the lens of Jewish text and tradition, died Monday at his home in Philadelphia. He was 92.
Zevachim 26 | My Jewish Learning
For the past few weeks, we’ve been learning about ways in which a sacrifice can become invalidated due to mistakes made by the priest, such as wearing an improper uniform, erroneously designating one type of sacrifice as another, and so forth.
We Evolve. So Does God.
The day after Yom Kippur is known as Gott’s Nomen Tag, Yiddish for the Day of God’s Name. First recorded in a 17th-century book about Ashkenazi synagogue life, this idea may simply refer to a liturgical change that takes place at this time: From Rosh Hashanah through Yom Kippur, we appeal at various crucial points in our prayers to Hamelech (“the King”).
Zevachim 12 | My Jewish Learning
We learned previously that a paschal offering accidentally slaughtered as some other kind of sacrifice is still valid as a peace offering — as long as this mistake doesn’t happen during the paschal offering’s “appointed time,” which likely means the afternoon of the 14th of Nisan (Erev Passover). But what about that morning?
The Enemy Is Ourselves
Political assassinations are shocking events. In my parents’ generation, people asked: “Where were you when Kennedy was shot?” In my generation, it is the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin that is most memorable. The Jewish calendar too has a day that commemorates a political assassination: The Fast of Gedaliah, observed on the day following Rosh Hashanah, honors a man who was neither king nor prophet, though he did come from an important family.
Zevachim 8 | My Jewish Learning
Today’s daf returns to a teaching from the opening mishnah of the tractate, which stated that: The paschal offering is unfit only at its appointed time. Many sacrifices, if offered with wrong intention, are not invalid, they just don’t serve the original purpose for which they were intended. This is not true for the paschal sacrifice offered with wrong intention on the 14th of Nisan, Erev Passover. Such a sacrifice is simply invalid.
Today’s daf continues to discuss cases in which the original intended purpose of a sacrifice is not what ends up happening. These rather technical debates about mistakes in the process of bringing a sacrifice raise many points about the meaning of different sacrifices. For example, the burnt offering (olah) is brought to atone for missed opportunities to do a positive commandment. Let’s say you designate an animal on Sunday to atone for missing Friday night Kiddush.
Zevachim 6 | My Jewish Learning
The entire system of Temple sacrifices is predicated on the requirement for a person who sins to bring a specific offering to atone for their misdeed. Today, the Talmud raises a fascinating question: If a person designates an animal for sacrifice to atone for one sin, can that same sacrifice also atone for a not-yet-committed sin that the person might make in the future? And how might such a two-for-one opportunity affect a person’s relationship with God?
Parashat Nitzavim: Choose Life
Commentary on Parashat Nitzavim, Deuteronomy 29:9-30:20 As we move toward the conclusion of the book of Deuteronomy, we read the continuation of Moses’ speech to the Israelites who are preparing to enter the land of Canaan. Moses reiterates the importance of keeping God’s mitzvot in order for the people to live and prosper and warns them of the consequences if they do not follow God’s covenant.
Horayot 11 | My Jewish Learning
You’re most likely familiar with the miracle of Hanukkah, in which a small jug of consecrated oil that would last only for one day at most, miraculously kept the menorah lit for eight days. But there’s a second, far less well-known miracle of oil. After the Exodus, God commands Moses to mix together anointing oil, which is poured on pretty much everything: the Tent of Meeting, the Ark, the table, utensils, the lampstand, the altars and Aaron and his sons. But the recipe seems a little off.
Today’s daf continues to investigate the consequences of mistaken legal rulings that lead to widespread communal sinning and what particular transgressions render a court liable. A mishnah on today’s daf teaches: The court is not liable unless they issue a mistaken ruling with regard to a matter for whose intentional violation is karet and for whose unwitting violation is a sin-offering. And likewise the anointed priest.
Horayot 7 | My Jewish Learning
On yesterday’s daf, the mishnah taught that if an anointed priest made an erroneous ruling for himself, and then acted on the basis of that ruling, he is required to bring a bull as an offering. The Talmud there explains: As the sages taught: “If the anointed priest shall sin so as to bring guilt upon the people” (Leviticus 4:3). The anointed priest is (liable to the same kind of offering) like the public. If a random individual sins, they are required to bring a ewe or female goat as an offering.
Avodah Zarah 76 | My Jewish Learning
Today we come to the final page of Tractate Avodah Zarah. For the last 2.5 months, we have followed the rabbis as they outlined an abundance of laws driven by one central concern: that Jews should keep a healthy distance from the idol worship that, in rabbinic times and before, was ubiquitous in the lands where Jews lived. The tractate opened with rules governing when Jews could do business with non-Jews.
Avodah Zarah 75 | My Jewish Learning
The mishnah on today’s daf, the last mishnah of tractate Avodah Zarah, is our primary source for the rules of kashering vessels: One who purchases utensils from gentiles: Those whose manner is to immerse them, he must immerse them. To purge (with boiling water), he must purge them. To heat until white-hot in the fire, he must heat them until white-hot in the fire. The spit and the grill, he must heat them until white-hot in the fire. The knife, he must polish it and it is pure.
Avodah Zarah 72 | My Jewish Learning
Consider, for a moment, the humble drinking straw. In our day, the damaging environmental impact of plastic waste has led to a growing industry in biodegradable and multiple-use straws (I favor sugarcane and metal, respectively).
The Judge's Dilemma | My Jewish Learning
Tzedek tzedek tirdof. Justice, justice you shall pursue. The famous double imperative that opens Parashat Shoftim does more than merely emphasize the centrality of justice. The repetition of tzedek marks a fundamental tension between two aspects of justice.
Avodah Zarah 70 | My Jewish Learning
On today’s daf, we read about a Jew and a non-Jew who were sitting together and drinking wine. From a distance, the Jew hears the sound or prayer emanating from the synagogue and gets up to join the service, leaving their wine unattended in the presence of the non-Jew. The question arises: Wwhen the Jew returns, is the wine now forbidden due to a concern that the non-Jew may have taken the opportunity to use it for a libation?
In the midst of the Gemara’s ongoing discussion about the nature of flavor and what gives positive or negative taste, we encounter this incident: A certain mouse fell into a barrel of beer. Rav deemed that beer forbidden. The sages said before Rav Sheshet: Shall we say that Rav maintains that (even in a case where the forbidden substance) imparts flavor to the detriment, it is forbidden?
Avodah Zarah 66 | My Jewish Learning
On yesterday’s daf, the mishnah explored the question of whether it’s permissible to benefit from grapes that came into contact with wine used for idolatrous purposes. The mishnah ruled that if said grapes were whole, they can be rinsed and then used again. But if they were sliced or otherwise physically compromised, they are off limits.
Avodah Zarah 65 | My Jewish Learning
On yesterday’s daf, Rav Yehuda taught that a Jew is prohibited from giving a holiday gift to a gentile due to the concern that they might use the gift, or the proceeds from its sale, for idol worship. Today, we read a story in which the same Rav Yehuda does exactly that: Rav Yehuda sent a gift to (a gentile named) Avidarna on their festival day. Rav Yehuda said: I know of him that he does not worship idols.
An update on the efficacy of sanctions against Russia
In June 2025 we published a paper calling on Europe to increasingly sanction Russia’s shadow fleet, especially now that the United States’ stance on Russian sanctions is unclear.
Avodah Zarah 63 | My Jewish Learning
Sex work was part of the ancient Israelite economy whether religious leaders liked it or not. Indeed, while Deuteronomy 23:18 explicitly prohibits Israelites from engaging in sex work, the very next verse assumes it is happening and that the money from it circulated in the economy: “You shall not bring the fee of a female sex-worker or the pay of a dog [or male sex worker] into the house of your God in fulfillment of any vow, for both are abhorrent to your God.
History and Memory
I didn’t watch the horrific footage from October 7th, but my 18-year-old daughter did. When I questioned why she would expose herself to such horror, she replied: “I never want to forget. I want it to be imprinted in my memory. My brothers and sisters endured it. I have to carry the weight of that trauma in my mind.” I was awed by her maturity and ethical clarity, yet also ambivalent about her exposure to such images.
Avodah Zarah 54 | My Jewish Learning
Today’s daf wraps up the discussion of objects of idol worship with a fascinating mishnah: The gentiles asked the Jewish sages who were in Rome: If it is not God’s will that people should engage in idol worship, why does God not eliminate it? The sages said to them: Were people worshipping only objects for which the world has no need, God would eliminate it. But they worship the sun and the moon and the stars and the constellations. Should God destroy their world because of fools?
Avodah Zarah 49 | My Jewish Learning
The mishnah on today’s daf continues to detail the prohibited ways of benefiting from an ashera tree, a type of tree used in idol worship: If one took wood from it, it is prohibited to benefit from it. If one kindled with it in an oven, if (the oven) is new, it must be shattered. But if it’s old, it may be used once cooled. If one baked bread with it, it is prohibited to benefit from it. The mishnah lays out distinctions between different types of prohibited benefit.
Ask the Ethicist: Is Cultural Appropriation OK?
Question: Dear friends of mine are planning their wedding and have asked me to participate. They are both Jewish, but plan to incorporate various Hindu and Native American traditions into the ceremony simply because they find them beautiful. This feels like cultural appropriation, which I oppose. Is there an ethical problem with this? Let me start by saying that I’m a former religious studies major who routinely shares wisdom from diverse traditions and who quoted Kahlil Gibran at his wedding.
Ask the Ethicist: Having Kids In a Time of Crisis
Question: I’ve always wanted to have children, and I know Judaism considers procreation a major mitzvah. But I’ve grown increasingly pessimistic about the future, particularly around climate change. I genuinely believe my children would grow up in an overheating world of increasing scarcity and political peril, particularly for Jews. Is it ethical to bring children into the world if I think they’re going to suffer? Judaism does indeed consider procreation a major mitzvah.
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