The Art of Growth
There is a great difference between pathology and imperfection, between being hypocritical and being human.
Category: Judaism
Yankel ZT”L
[Rabbi Dovid Landesman is a veteran mechanech and the mechaber of a sefer on Netziv.] Today – Yom ha-Zikaron L’chayalei Tzahal – is one of the most difficult days for me in the calendar...
The Hora, the Hassidic Tune, and the Memorial for Fallen Soldiers
“That’s a premier Israeli folksong,” claimed someone from the audience when my co-translator and I showed a video of a Sanz hassidim singing a piyut sung at Seudah Shlishit on Shabbat. I ruminated on...
Incident at Durban II
You won’t read about this in conventional media. My dear colleague, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, was one of three senior officials of the Simon Wiesenthal Center to attend last week’s “Durban II” United Nations conference...
Who Feels Chosen?
Few concepts are so closely with the Jewish people as that of the “Chosen People.” That singularity is reiterated constantly in the Torah. We are referred to variously as “a kingdom of priests, a...
Gates of Wisdom
Last week’s news of a healthy 14% first-quarter profit for Apple Computer stood out as a ray of hope in an otherwise gloomy economic landscape. The company’s strong sales were due largely to the...
A Serendipitous Comment to Hillel Goldberg’s Post
A scant few hours after Rabbi Goldberg posted his essay , I showed up at a school where I teach, only to discover that my class was preempted by some visitors who were going...
Unanticipated responses to Orthodox-Reform fissures
My entire adult life I’ve been hearing about the coming demise of the American Jewish community. The first such prediction, some 40 years ago, went like this: The Orthodox and the Reform define a...
Blaming Us for Their Problems
Those moving from America to Israel on aliyah are predominantly Orthodox, while Reform and Conservative Jews are staying put in America. Most of us would attribute this to Orthodox “willingness to pay a personal...
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