Author: Yitzchok Adlerstein

Yerushalayim has been uneventful for the last few days. Services are pretty much at normal levels, except for the public schools, which are still closed. Still hard to find bottled water, after the stupid...

Tuesday It’s been a quiet day in Yerushalayim, at least insofar as the sirens going off. In the skies above, it’s been non-stop bombing runs. Government schools will again be closed tomorrow. Busses are...

Monday. Haazinu ha-shomayim/Heavens, give ear! (Devarim 32:1) The heavens over Yerushalayim complied, with a pall that hung over the city, reflecting back the mood of shock, disbelief, and foreboding of the people. Roads were...

Conversation in shul, while they were rolling the (single) sefer Torah from one Chumash to another: Me: I understand you had a rough week. Former Senator Joe Lieberman: How’s that? Me: Well, I know...

Once again, life imitates art. The result is not pretty. Doc Daneeka, a fictional character in Joseph Heller’s modern classic, explains its eponymous Catch-22. A flyer can escape combat duty if he is insane....

For decades, Chabad’s want-to-wrap-tefillin legions made us feel uncomfortable. More bluntly, we mocked them. To be sure, that was only half of the picture. We openly admired Chabad’s mesiras nefesh, and their very real...

Not intentionally, of course. And not from a justice of the Israeli Supreme Court. Consider the following [with very minor edits in brackets]: At the behest of a party that has suffered no injury,...

With the passing Tuesday evening of Rav Moshe Grylak z”l, we lost an unsung giant of our generation. And I lost a friend and mentor. His was a name familiar to both the Israeli...

There is no gainsaying the importance of tznius in the life of the Torah Jew and the Torah community. Yet, few issues have contributed more to young people losing their enthusiasm for Torah –...

Unity. The magical elixir for assuring Divine favor. When we are united, say Chazal, Hashem is with us even when we are sinners. Where does that leave us? We cannot remember a time of...