Open and Shut Case
The lady on the Staten Island ferry the other day was clearly grunting for my ears. With my unfashionable beard, dark suit and black hat, tagging me as an Orthodox Jew is pretty much...
Category: Judaism
Klal Perspectives: New Issue on Connectedness
With pride, we announce the third issue of the online journal Klal Perspectives. Is there an epidemic of spiritual malaise, even among people fully observant? How widespread are feelings of lack of connection with...
The Powers That Be
This week, I cannot refer to “this week’s reading” and be universally accurate. The Torah portion read this week in Israel is “out of sync” with the rest of the world, a phenomenon that...
Exegesis and Eisegesis: Response to a Reader
You wrote: “People read in their own thoughts to what they want a text to say – only skipping the nicety of reading their findings into a Maamar Chazal. The result is the same....
Suprising… and Not So Much
After a hail of French police gunfire relieved humanity of the noxious presence of Mohamed Merah, the 23-year-old Algerian-Frenchman who murdered seven people, including three children, in cold blood and declared himself ready to...
True Independence
Rabbi Yaakov of Lissa famously asks in his commentary on the Haggadah, Ma’aseh Nissim: If someone were released from prison and subsequently imprisoned again, would he invite his cell mates to gather with him...
Is the BBC Getting it Right?
Since the BBC, like most British media outlets, isn’t highly regarded for balanced coverage of Israel, I felt it worth pointing out a notable exception. “Gaza-Israel clashes: The view from each side“, although nearly...
The Pesach Plan
The group of Novardhoker yeshiva bochurim and their rebbe (and his rebbetzin)—along with a number of families—were packed into the train’s stock cars in the summer of 1941. Since Rav Yehudah Leib Nekritz, zt”l,...
The Media’s “Cultural Autism”
The chairman and vice-chairman of Israel’s Media Watch, in a Jerusalem Post Op-Ed, question the failure of Israel’s dominant media outlets to cover “happenings which could appeal to audiences coming from different cultural backgrounds.”...
Bible Codes: Response to a Misleading Hamodia Article
The article on the so-called Bible Codes in Hamodia’s weekly magazine of March 21 is both laden with inaccuracies and dangerous. We hereby set the record straight, albeit briefly. When the Bible Codes were...
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