Sefer Torah Abuse
We rend our garments if a sefer Torah is, chalilah, desecrated. If one should fall to the ground, it is customary for those present to undertake to fast that day. I don’t know what...
Author: Avi Shafran
Ebola and Metzitza Bipeh
Part of a message from the Medical Society of the State of New York to local physicians reads as follows: “Strategies to limit the potential for [Ebola] transmission… should be based on the best...
Moral Climate Change
My pre-Sukkos column about the furious, quasi-religious zeal of some environmental alarmists apparently generated some… well, furious, quasi-religious zeal. In an editorial, the New Jersey Jewish Standard’s managing editor mocked my contention that the...
Winter High
The wishes of “git vinter!” customary in some communities after Shemini Atzeres might put some people in mind of fall’s end weeks hence, and give them a chill. Not me. I’m decidedly in the...
“Personal Torah”
A recent announcement by a respected Conservative rabbi has been trumpeted widely as evidence of his heroism. My take is somewhat different, and was published, to the periodical’s credit, by the Forward. You can...
Misplaced Zeal
The powerful swell of voices on Broadway, thirteen stories below Agudath Israel’s offices, did more than disturb my concentration. A thousand people were blocking traffic and loudly chanting in unison, the roar less redolent...
Malignancies
There’s nothing remotely funny, of course, about rabid Islamists beheading innocent Westerners they have kidnapped (or their fellow Muslims, for that matter). Yet, there is something bizarrely droll about the characterization of such slaughter,...
Letter in NYT
To the Editor: Dr. Barron H. Lerner concedes that it was proper for medicine to abandon the medical paternalism that had doctors make “life-and-death decisions for patients by themselves,” but he asserts that doctors...
Time After Time
Ever since the famous science fiction writer H. G. Wells penned “The Time Machine” in 1895, the notion of a protagonist traveling through time by means of magic or fantastic technology has captured the...
When Orthodox Jews Boycott Israeli Produce
The article below appeared in Haaretz last week. The “ultra-Orthodox” are at it again. This time they’re aiding and abetting the BDS movement. Well, not intentionally perhaps, but still. An early welcome to 5775!...
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