Dark-eyed, long-bearded and posing in rabbinic cap and garb, my maternal grandfather looks down at me from within his cherry-wood frame over the desk where I write. We never met; he died 16 years...
A rather stark contradiction seems to lie in how Chazal describe the judgment meted out to a ben sorer u’moreh, the boy who, at the tender age of 13, demonstrates indulgences and worse, and...
The belief that Jews are cheap has merit, though “frugal” would be the more perceptive word. Valuing everything, no matter how small or seemingly trivial, is a fundamental Jewish ideal. My parents rinsed and...
“Can’t you jus’ see ‘im walkin’ on that water?” an elderly lady with a large hat, standing next to me on the foredeck of the Staten Island ferry and holding a bible, once asked...
Carl Sagan once observed that “If you wish to make apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” There was a long period of history when the idea that the universe had...
The centerpiece, if such a word can be used in the context of a parshah, of Vo’eschanan is generally assumed to be the Aseres Hadibros, the Decalogue. But I think that the even more...
It’s rare for city dwellers to truly see the night sky. Only once, many years ago, driving on a moonless night in West Virginia, did I fully perceive the vast number of stars –...
One of the most – if not the most – confounding laws in the Torah is that of the go’el hadam, the relative of someone who was accidentally killed, who is permitted (in some...
The law of kana’im pog’im bo – “the zealous ones can attack him” – that Pinchas acted upon to dispatch Zimri and Kozbi is a highly unusual, if not singular, one: If one poses...
My thoughts on the obnoxious actions of a group of young Orthodox Jews at the Robinson’s Arch area of the Western Wall, and some of the reactions to them, can be read here.
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