Eager as always to rouse myself from yawning indifference before the Nine Days, my first welcome stirrings came compliments of a moderate Muslim. He reminded me of an aspect of national memory that I...
This picture says so much about those racist Israelis. It proves that Israel is an apartheid state. Immanuel had been entombed in a concrete coffin for nine days. A victim of the Haiti earthquake,...
After the horror, the disbelief, the shock, the emptiness, I next thought what many others must have. He had to have been a pedophile. I messaged a colleague, a respected rov, and asked what...
By now, everyone has heard the one about the two guys sitting next to each other on a Tel Aviv bus. The guy looking at Haaretz can’t believe that the fellow sitting next to...
Quite a number of readers voiced surprise at my earlier piece that that a get could be valid despite the husband’s obvious expectation of a payoff that never came. (Because they overlapped, we only...
Can practices fully accepted halachically become unacceptable because of changed technology? According to Israel’s Chief Rabbinate, it seems so. It has decided that methods of handling animals before shechitah that were used in the...
The closest we get to soap opera in Chumash is Esav’s family tree in Bereishis 36, replete with many intimations of incest and other illicit relationships (see Mizrachi 36:2). According to the New York...
Larger than life challenges to Torah values can be met in two different ways. We can prudently retreat, placing the sanctity of what is most important to us ahead of all other needs and...
I couldn’t resist sharing this wonderful reminiscence of a father by his son. Rabbi Saul Berman penned this recently upon the occassion of his father’s,z”l,34th yahrzeit. It is published with permission of the author....
The current halachic rage – the status of fish known to host worms – presents two layers of fascination to me. From the very beginning, I recognized that how you generally understand the intersection...
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