For a number of years I’ve been checking Jewish Ideas Daily, a site that featured writers I’d like to publish in First Things (and in fact often have). It’s now morphed into something new: Mosaic Magazine .
This new web offering is the ultimate anti-Twitter. It’s goal is to publish a long form essay each month, adding invited commentary at intervals. It’s a website for someone who wants to settle down and read something substantive, something, well, akin to a good First Things essay.
The inaugural essay, ” The Ten Commandments: Why the Decalogue Matters ,” is by Leon Kass. He does a particularly good job illuminating the exhortation to keep the Sabbath holy. Sabbath-keeping is an imitatio dei. The exposition of the commandment to honor your mother and father is also well done. “Beware the universalist,” Kass writes, “who has contempt fo the particulars; beware the lover of humanity, or of holiness, who does not honor his own father and mothers.”
It’s a fine essay, one I wish we could have had for First Things .