The Looking Glass Letter is a newsletter about Torah and Jewish thought, written for people who take both the tradition and their own questions seriously.
Most Jewish writing picks a side. Some of it speaks only to people who already believe, and treats doubt as something to be fixed. Some of it treats the tradition from a safe distance, as history or literature, and never asks what it might mean for how you live. This letter tries to do something harder: to read the sources closely and honestly, in a way that has room for the committed and the doubting at the same table.
That means real text — a verse, a passage, a question that’s been argued over for centuries — read with enough depth to reward someone who’s spent their life inside it, and enough honesty to speak to someone who isn’t sure what they believe anymore. If you’re settled in your faith, I hope you’ll find the tradition taken as seriously as you take it. If you’re not settled, I hope you’ll find that your questions are welcome here, not as a problem, but as the beginning of the reading.
The name comes from aspaklaria — the lens or glass through which one perceives. The tradition says Moses saw through a clear glass, and the rest of us through one that’s dimmer. That gap is more or less the subject of this letter: how we see, how clearly, and what it would take to see a little more.
I’m Adam Jacobs. I’ve spent decades studying and teaching this material, and I run The Looking Glass, where this letter lives. New pieces arrive on a regular cadence, straight to your inbox. It’s free.
If any of that sounds like your kind of reading, subscribe. I’d be glad to have you.
