Category: Judaism
China, Skepticism and Belief
China used to bother me quite a bit when I was younger. A lot of people seemed to live there, but it was notoriously absent from the world view of Chazal. (At that point...
A Seamless White Cloak
by Doron Beckerman The success of the holy enterprise rested on the broad shoulders of the seasoned prophet. This was to be the climax of the Exodus, the end of the Redemption, the return...
A Personal Note to Cross-Currents Readers
I had been planning to write a follow-up message about my posting “The Earth Trembles” even before Illana B.’s comment (# 20) appeared. But her request – taking me back to my family’s wonderful...
The place of a non-believing Jew
At a simchah recently, I bumped into the father of an old friend, whom I hadn’t seen for many years. Charlie was always known as a forthright person, and it was good to see...
The Earth Trembles
To any early 20th century Polish Jew, Japan could as well have been Neptune. The distance between the shtetl and the Far East was measurable not merely in physical miles but in cultural and...
Tefillin Terror!
I just watched the YouTube of Chief Inspector Joe Sullivan of the Philadelphia Police Department explain what went wrong on that flight to Louisville Thursday morning. A cabin attendant, not familiar with the Jewish...
Dismissing Dybbuks
While Rabbi Dovid Batzri’s first attempt to drive the dybbuk out was not apparently successful, R. Elyashiv, shtlit”a, reportedly refused to allow it in in the first place, according to the account in Chadrei...
The Problem
Objective observers of the Middle East, though, should think long and hard about what happened in the wake of the mosque burning, and in the wake of Rabbi Chai’s murder.
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