Exegesis and Eisegesis: Response to a Reader
You wrote: “People read in their own thoughts to what they want a text to say – only skipping the nicety of reading their findings into a Maamar Chazal. The result is the same....
A Safety Concern For Pesach
While most of us are busy looking for Chametz, others are looking for something very different and nefarious. Yakov Horowitz posted some sobering and sane advice for parents about the prevalence of child molestation...
The Pesach Plan
The group of Novardhoker yeshiva bochurim and their rebbe (and his rebbetzin)—along with a number of families—were packed into the train’s stock cars in the summer of 1941. Since Rav Yehudah Leib Nekritz, zt”l,...
Material on the Haggadah
Last week, I gave two shiurim that may be of interest to those who get desperate enough. I’m making them available through this post. The first was part of a series of shiurim with...
Bible Codes: Response to a Misleading Hamodia Article
The article on the so-called Bible Codes in Hamodia’s weekly magazine of March 21 is both laden with inaccuracies and dangerous. We hereby set the record straight, albeit briefly. When the Bible Codes were...
The Loss of Civic Virtue and its Consequences
Harvard economic historian Niall Ferguson notes that one of the striking features of the history of past civilizations is the “speed with which most of them collapsed, regardless of cause.” The fall of the...
United in Tefillah
These are trying times, to be sure. Without trying very hard, the Orthodox world finds itself united in the way it deals with its heavy hearts and foreboding thoughts. People are all doing the...
Chumrah Done Wrong
She’s no Deborah Feldman. That makes her story so much more valuable to us. Writing in Tablet, the literary cynosure of every young Jewish iconoclast these days, Avital Chizhik lets us know that she...
Agudath Israel Statement on Toulouse Attack
The murderous attack on the Ozar Hatorah school in Toulouse, France this morning is a tragedy that rightly tears the hearts of Jews and people of good will everywhere. More than a tragedy, though,...
A Valuable Tool For the Seder
“Guided spontaneity” might be a good description for the Seder night. What we usually recite as the first part of Hallel becomes “shirah” at the annual revisiting of the birth of our people. The...