In Those Days, In This Time
The following essay was written for Haaretz and appeared on its website recently under a different title. I share it here with that paper’s permission. There’s a striking irony in the fact that Chanukah...
Category: Religion
The Rabbi has no Robes
Earlier this year, I wrote about how easy it now is to become a Reform or Conservative Rabbi, with the advent of $8000 online ordination. An enterprising woman from Detroit has managed to take...
Seeding the Right Cloud
Following the time-honored if somewhat irritating tradition of speechmakers who begin by announcing that they are departing from the scheduled topic, I informed those present that instead of focusing on the media’s coverage of...
Federated Blindness
So the Jewish Federations of North America, the massive collected financial might of America’s leading Jewish donors, has left Jerusalem. Their General Assembly only meets in Jerusalem once every five years, so this was...
In re Limmud: A Rejoinder to Rabbi Cardozo
Torah Judaism has always been defined by belief in binding halacha, based upon the Torah given to Moshe Rabbeinu at Sinai and the rabbinical exegesis contained in the Talmud. While there are endless disputes...
Alan Dershowitz to the Rescue
Celebrated attorney Alan Dershowitz has petitioned Israeli President Shimon Peres to intervene in what Haaretz characterizes as “the case of the apparent blacklisting of Rabbi Avi Weiss by Israel’s Chief Rabbinate.” That is to...
The Way We Are
While those of us here south of the border (the Canadian one, that is) were focused on our own local elections, a Chassidic woman candidate in a Montreal borough was busy making history. Mindy...
A Kiddush Hashem Goes Viral
Tablet magazine carries the story of Isaac Theil (which is on the NY Daily News, as well), who was innocently riding home to Brooklyn on the Q train when a young black man (tired...
What’s New
As someone with a well-honed sense of wonder, who delights at the sight of a blue jay (even though several of them regularly greet my wife and me outside the window during autumn breakfasts)...
Orthodoxy and Honesty
The essay below was written for, and published by, Haaretz.com. I offer it here with that paper’s permission — and with my apologies to readers who may feel that enough has been written about...
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