Baby Einstein
An amusing pair of letters to the editor appeared in the New York Times Book Review on April 13, responding to a review of a book about the science of human reproduction. Both letters...
Author: Avi Shafran
The Egalitarianism Has Landed
My computer cautions me against fooling with certain manufacturer-determined system settings. Doing so, it warns, could create serious problems. Riskier still is messing around with Judaism’s system-settings, determined by the ultimate Manufacturer. That lesson...
Jewish Wealths
Stephen Schwarzman is a very wealthy man. And a very generous one. The CEO and co-founder of The Blackstone Group, a New York investment bank, recently made the largest unrestricted gift to any New...
The Wright Stuff
Even before Senator Barack Obama unequivocally denounced Reverend Jeremiah Wright as the loon he is, I was willing to take the senator’s word for the fact that his erstwhile pastor’s rantings about America, the...
The Four Answers
It is not only the Torah’s words that hold multiple layers of meaning. So do those of the Talmudic and Midrashic Sages – even the words of the prayers and rituals they formulated. Such...
Deconstructing Dayeinu
Much of our Seder-night message to our children, mediated by the Haggadah, is forthright and clear. Some of it, though, is subtle and stealthy. Dayeinu, for example. On the surface, it is a simple...
Jewish Multiple Personality Disorder
The media’s fascination with Orthodox Jews seems to only intensify with time. Some of us Orthodox may be discomfited by reports that television and motion pictures have come to increasingly offer up observant Jewish...
When Many Are One
Some outsiders regard the Orthodox Jewish world as monolithic, but those of us within the community know well that quite the opposite is the case. Few religious communities are as diverse. The Orthodox universe...
Governing Ourselves
The “steamroller,” we all know, was steamrolled. Although those whom Eliot Spitzer focused on flattening were New York State wrongdoers, he ended up being mangled by misdeeds of his own. And thereby became an...
Accidents Don’t Happen
With time, those with open eyes come to recognize that life is peppered with strange, small ironies – “coincidences” that others don’t even notice, or unthinkingly dismiss. The famous psychiatrist Carl Jung puzzled over...
Recent Comments