Parshas Ekev – Does Heaven Play Favorites? (and more)
Well, does He or doesn’t He? Hashem, that is. Does he show special favor to some or not? That question is placed by Rabbi Ami or Rabbi Asi (Berachos 20b) in the mouths of...
Category: General
Ben and Jerry’s: Not Your Plain-Vanilla Crisis
Impulse shopping for ice cream, as our scales will testify, is hardly uncommon. Maybe in this instance it was not so common, because I don’t really eat ice cream. Yet I found myself drawn...
Parshas Devarim: Timeless
Sefer Devarim begins with Moshe Rabbeinu’s recounting of the Jewish People’s history since the exodus from Egypt, through the years of desert-wandering. And our communal reading of the beginning of the sefer coincides yearly...
The New Jew
No big deal, they said. The new Pew Report offered few surprises. The 2013 report showed an American Jewish community looking like a patient with multiple systems failure; the current report showed vital signs...
Parshas Naso- An Opportunity, Not an Ordeal
I cringe when I read someone’s portrayal of the law of Sotah ritual as some sort of “trial by ordeal.” That phrase conjures images like the 17th century Salem witch trials, when Puritans invoked...
From Yom Yerushalayim to Meron
As a woman in a shiur I gave on Shabbos put it, Yom Yerushalayim, sadly, has become the exclusive province of the Dati Leumi community here in Israel. Secular Jews have lost interest; charedim...
Israeli Modern Orthodoxy and Female Clergy – Crossing the Line
The headline caught a huge amount of attention: In Israeli first, woman chosen as sole spiritual leader of Orthodox community. The article, and countless other versions of the same, reports that Rabbanit Shira Marili...
The Highly Educated Hate Us, Too – Maybe More Dangerously
For decades, more education was presumed to be the antidote to anti-Semitism. People with more years of education showed less hostility to Jews in survey after survey. Jews and their non-Jewish allies placed their...
My Father’s Passover and Ours
An essay of mine about what the experiences of two Jews during the Holocaust on Pesach might have to teach us about the present appeared in the Wall Street Journal on erev Shabbos. It...
Why I Am Not Yanky Kanievsky
Silly, you say. I’m not Yanky because my grandfather is not R. Chaim, shlit”a. You’re showing your age. Today, you can be whatever you want, just by identifying. If I wanted to, I should...
Recent Comments