Rav Aharon Lichtenstein zt”l
By Hillel Goldberg Last Monday morning at the close of davening I received a call from my son, in tears, who told me that Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein had passed away. I told my son...
Happy Birthday to a Great Country: Haaretz vs. the Meshech Chochmah
I still don’t understand why my friends at the Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles urged me some time ago to attend a small reception for Avi Shavit and his then-current book, My Promised Land....
A Foreign Fire
Last night was the yahrtzeit, the anniversary of his passing, of Rav Zvi Elimelech Hertzberg zt”l, my wife’s grandfather. The Hertzbergs were amazing people — they took Holocaust refugees into their homes, treated them...
Children Surviving Divorce
by David Mandel Polio, Tuberculosis, Cancer – each word elicits stark images of masses yearning for a better day. And for each, better days would come. Sanitariums closed in the early 20th Century, Iron...
Challenges to Tranquility
An article of mine about dealing with change appears in a new periodical, “InSight,” published by Rabbi Avraham Mifsud of Detroit. You can read the piece here.
1984?
My rumination for the Forward on the contemporary state of religious rights — like that of citizens to disapprove of relationships — can be read here.
Same Sex Marriage, Polygamy and Sharia Law: Some Thoughts
By Michael J. Broyde The first step to planning for the future is predicting the likely challenges: Same sex marriage is here, allowing religiously based discrimination is proposed as part of the solution and...
Pesach the Rabbi Served Chametz
After reading many new approaches to Pesach on the part of the Open Orthodox rabbinate, I felt compelled to note some of them and explain the problems. So too for a new Open Orthodox...
The Seder Is A Mother
The Forward published an essay I wrote about the “maternal” essence of the Pesach Seder. You can read it here.
Dew-ey Wins!: Tal, Explained
While ancients waxed poetic about dew, most of us city folk only think about it when it fogs our windshields early in the morning. That changes, of course, on the first day of Pesach...