Judge Everyone Favorably, Reprise
Does everyone favor their own, except the Jews? It is we who have a Mitzvah to love our fellows like ourselves, and to judge every other Jew favorably, as we would like ourselves to...
Category: Judaism
Our Not-So-Humble Opinions
So often we seem to feel a need to embrace absolute, take-no-prisoners political opinions; to reject any possibility of ambivalence, much less any admission of ignorance.
How To Respond to the Renting Ban – And How To Fail At It
Many responded to the psak of a group of rabbis in Israel (including a few impressive names) that it was forbidden to rent to Arabs. A small handfu of these responsesl were adequate. Most...
Romanticizing Intolerance
Many of you who are known to support Israel likely received the same link through a well-meaning friend’s email, pointing to a YouTube that you had to see to believe. Finally, someone with the...
The Past in the Present
“I [had] promised [myself] that I would go to Bialystok and something was telling me – maybe it was because I was stubborn — I said I am going to yeshiva and I’m going to go.”
A Cautionary Tale
The headline says it all: “Court orders Orthodox woman to be cremated after three-month battle.” Ethel Baar, who died on September 11, began following Orthodox Judaism late in life, and her great-nephew James Pollak...
The Next Silent Problem After Abuse
There is much more reason for us to feel guilty about the problem of abuse in our community than ever before. A hundred years ago, there was abuse. In a teshuva of the Bais...
Hashgacha Within The Embers
Part of the most recent update from the firelines by Prof. Menachem Kellner of University of Haifa may be a good illustration of the old saw that anyone who believes all the stories about...
A Chanukah Primer With a Pretext
Man bites dog is news; the New York Times getting the starting date of Chanukah wrong is not news. In regard to the Howard Jacobson op-ed on the subject, everything else about the piece...
Shedding Light on Anti-Semitism
What motivates the would-be Chanukah-diminishers, I suspect, is their discomfort with Chanukah’s elemental message.
Recent Comments