Author: Yaakov Menken

A few months ago, my wife and I spent Shabbos in Flatbush (a Brooklyn neighborhood with a large Orthodox community) for the first time in well over a decade. At some point, my wife...

Sometimes you get quick answers in CyberSpace, but I didn’t expect Ralphie to be answering my question about Rabbi Shafran’s article, before I’d even published it. [You may need to read my previous posts,...

Once again, something from Toby Katz fits well with a post I was planning to make. She wrote: Nowadays even many of the clergy in the heterodox movements are in the category of “tinok...

by Avi Shafran, via Am Echad Resources I don’t own a television and so have never seen an episode of the popular program “Grey’s Anatomy,” which has been described as a contemporary, R-rated soap...

What does an MP3 player have to do with my esteemed fellow bloggers? Not much, perhaps, but I can attempt to explain the stream of thought that led to this post. Recently, I was...

When I was a university student, there was a professor who joined the Orthodox daily minyan (services) for a time in order to say Kaddish for a relative. He commented that he felt that...

UPDATED 9 Iyar, Wed., May 18 The funeral of Aaron Rosenfeld (he was my nephew, the son of my wife’s brother Elie) took place at 1:30 pm Tuesday. He was eighteen. Thank you for...

Our Torah provided the symbol of the medical profession: a snake wrapped around a pole. You find this symbol used by medical schools, hospitals, and the American Medical Association. The source is the following...

Please learn, Daven and say Tehillim (Psalms) for the speedy recovery of Refael Aharon Elimelech ben Penina Liba, a young man who is very seriously ill. May he have a speedy healing b’soch sha’ar...

Concerning Jonathan Rosenblum’s post this morning on the topic of non-Jews wearing Yarmulkes, I think the brouhaha over the Turkish Prime Minister not wearing one is a symptom of a larger issue. I think...