Deathless
Odd that the Torah-portion about the death of Yaakov Avinu is called “Vayechi.” After all, the word means “And he lived.” And, differently voweled, the word can mean “And he will live.” And especially...
Category: Science
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)...
In Our Bones
We cannot see the tens of thousands of mazikin, or “harmers” (often translated as “demons”), that the Talmud teaches surround us always (Berachos 6a). Were they visible, says Abba Binyamin, they would utterly terrify...
A Fourth of July Thought
The very same thought occurred to me and to one of my daughters the night of July 4. I was walking home from Maariv (evening services) in Staten Island; my daughter was looking out...
Infestation Inspiration
The thought, a staple in the writings of the celebrated Jewish thinker Rabbi E. E. Dessler (1892-1953), is best known to people unfamiliar with his thought and writings from a famous and evocative paragraph...
On The Front Line
Like mosquitoes dive-bombing a rock, a swarm of writers are waging a spirited, ineffectual, attack on human free will. One observer of the spate of recent books arguing that people are biological automatons, James...
Think the Internet isn’t all that Dangerous? Think Again.
In the lead-up to the Internet Asifa, Rav Aharon Feldman wrote that the problems associated with the Internet do not begin and end with inappropriate content, and thus filters alone are not a solution....
Global Worrying
I think I’ve discovered what makes me so uncomfortable about the assertion that global warming is a real and urgent problem. A front-page New York Times story on May 1 concerned (thanks, Mr. Rumsfeld,...
Unplug Yourself
Could it be that the venerable New York Times actually imitates Mishpacha magazine? Could they possibly be taking their ideas from the Orthodox and using them as their own? Highly unlikely, but the facts...
Blind Faith and Physics
A recent essay by an award-winning scientist presents a remarkable, and remarkably revealing, picture of current scientific thought about the nature of the universe. The delightfully named Alan P. Lightman, an MIT professor a...
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