Teaching Responsibility
Oscar Hammerstein applied the words differently in South Pacific in 1949, but they ring true today. “You’ve got to be carefully taught,” for the most part, to take responsibility for the general community. Reflecting...
Category: Judaism
Praying for the Government
by N. Daniel Korobkin Recent criminal scandals within the Orthodox world have been devastating. How did we get to this point? To be sure, there are undoubtedly multiple factors that contributed to this new...
Wings and Prayers
There is a world of difference between Tevya’s celebration of “Tradition!” for tradition’s sake and the deep meanings that lie in the rites and rituals of Jewish religious life.
Aiding the Destroyers Among Us
The Swedish government refused to condemn a totally unsupported article in the country’s largest circulation newspaper alleging that Israel routinely kidnaps and murders Palestinians to harvest their organs. To comment, said Swedish Foreign Minister...
Further Reflections Upon Prague
The Jewish community in Prague almost immediately set off an association in my mind with a gemara in Menachos. Menachos 53B has Avraham almost at the point of despair for his people, after hearing...
Saved from the fires of Ruzhan
And so there we sat, all through the Sabbath, watching as the synagogue in which we had been imprisoned mere hours earlier was claimed by the flames and, along with all the Torah-scrolls and...
Tempest in a Teapot
Eytan Kobre asserts, in his most recent contribution, that the secular Jewish media turns free-market economics into sinister “pressure” when the word “charedi” can be placed before it. And, of course, he is right....
Of Bishops and Golems
When a shul dates back to the thirteenth century, you have to take pains to preserve it. So you won’t find an active minyan in Prague’s Altneushul three times a day. Monday, Elul 18,...
Selichos, 1939
The smell of smoke grew even stronger as did the cries of the hundreds of Jews packed in the synagogue awaiting a terrible death. And then, a miracle occurred.
Of Anthropology and Apathy
“You have to wonder what they’ll come up with next.” With that snide introduction, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports that 20 Israeli hotels catering to an Orthodox clientele have signed a “modesty code” committing...
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