It’s Not All Ferguson
There are more pleasant things to contemplate than an 11:30PM visit by the police department on the first night of Sukkos. This one, however, rewrote the script – and added to our Yom Tov....
Was Michelangelo a Philo-Semite?
Michelangelo lived at a time when the Catholic Church was increasing its oppression of Jews — but his painting of the Sistine Chapel is almost entirely drawn from the Jewish Bible, emphasizing the connection between the Church and the Jewish nation. And then there’s Aminadab.
Enjoy!
Each year, sitting in the sukkah on the first night of Sukkos, with my wife and whoever among our children and grandchildren we are fortunate to have with us for Yom Tov, I feel...
News on International Beit Din (IBD)
As I posted a few weeks ago, decisions about the proper adjudication of agunah cases need to be left to the highest echelon of halachic authorities and cannot be subject to popular petition and protest. Nevertheless,...
New Understanding of a Line in Selichos
At several times in the last decades, people posed questions about the propriety of making references to Yerushalayim as a ruin, as if it still showed the signs of the devastation left by the...
Eliyahu’s Double Plea
The Rambam’s logic, as always, is unassailable. Miracles, he informs us (Hilchos Yesodei HaTorah, 8:1), simply cannot be bases of belief. What appears to us as miraculous, he explains, could always be trickery or...
Responding to New Open Orthodox Provocations
I was really hoping that theological breaches on the part of the Open Orthodox/Neo-Conservative (OONC) movement would be tapering off and that there would thus be no need for further rejoinder. Oh, was I wrong! After a series...
The Pictures of 5775
Accusatory fingers point all over during this season, and some are properly pointed at me. In this season of cheshbon hanefesh, many of us, myself included, spend too much time with the news. While,...
Link to Shloshim for Rabbi Dovid Landesman z”l
Cross-Currents readers who remember the breathtaking honesty of Rabbi Landesman in his guest contributions and his devastating comments might want to join the hundreds of talmidim who will take part digitally in the shloshim...
The King and Us
One of the findings of a recent Pew Research Center report about Orthodox Jews was that for the vast majority of them – are you sitting down? – “religion is very important in their...