Walden Ponder
by Dovid Landesman Last week, my wife and I had the distinct pleasure of attending the induction ceremony of the Netzach Yehudah [a.k.a. Nachal Chareidi] brigade. Our youngest son is the brigade’s sergeant major...
Category: Judaism
The Meat of the Matter
A number of weeks ago, I became aware of an essay contest conceived by The New York Times Magazine’s resident “ethicist”—a columnist, that is, who entertains readers’ questions about moral or ethical quandaries they...
Yom HaShoah at Ft. Hood (Part Two)
[continues from an earlier piece] There is no easy way out of the quandary about presenting the Shoah to non-Jews, at least not if you have to pick a single approach. It is like...
Etiquette and Ethics
This year, the first day of Shavuos fell on a Sunday. Were there any Tzadukim and Baitusim still around today, they would have been happy. Because those rejecters of the mesorah contended that Shavuos...
Sinai and Jewish Unity
Of all the many sterling qualities of the chareidi community in Israel, I suspect no one would list public relations acumen near the top. And of the many public relations failures of the community...
Citifield: A Scorecard
No event on the scale of the recent Citifield asifa takes place without its enthusiasts and without its detractors, without some surrounding hype and without some cynical push-back. With the passage of time, it...
New Old Torah
Chazal instruct us to approach Torah each day with the wonder and excitement of something new and fresh. This is both good advice and a tall order; familiarity and the sense of routine that...
A Priest Walks into a Shul…
Have you ever been to a church service? Me neither. Still, I (and perhaps you) have an image of what one is like. And that image, strange as it might seem, is an important...
Looking for Win-Win
Eight or nine years ago, I received a visit from a kollel student in his late ’20s. The young manyoung man in question had been one of the outstanding students in one of Israel’s...
Coney Island Memoirs – Affirmative Action
by Philip Lefkowitz It was the 1960s, a tumultuous time for the civil rights movement in the United States. Cities were burning, race riots where breaking out everywhere. In New York City, Mayor John...
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