“Some people think Army is Yeshiva”
The question of why the Haredi community tends to avoid or minimize IDF service is one with multiple facets, one of which is the ongoing hostility of the IDF towards Jewish religious practice. A...
The Face of Apartheid Israel
This picture says so much about those racist Israelis. It proves that Israel is an apartheid state. Immanuel had been entombed in a concrete coffin for nine days. A victim of the Haiti earthquake,...
Yadeinu Shafchu Es Hadam Hazeh
After the horror, the disbelief, the shock, the emptiness, I next thought what many others must have. He had to have been a pedophile. I messaged a colleague, a respected rov, and asked what...
Want to Be Ugly? Buy LUSH
By now, everyone has heard the one about the two guys sitting next to each other on a Tel Aviv bus. The guy looking at Haaretz can’t believe that the fellow sitting next to...
Postscript to a Tale of Rabbinic Wisdom
Quite a number of readers voiced surprise at my earlier piece that that a get could be valid despite the husband’s obvious expectation of a payoff that never came. (Because they overlapped, we only...
Can An Animal Change Its Tza’ar Ba’alei Chaim Spots?
Can practices fully accepted halachically become unacceptable because of changed technology? According to Israel’s Chief Rabbinate, it seems so. It has decided that methods of handling animals before shechitah that were used in the...
Esav and the New Modern Family
The closest we get to soap opera in Chumash is Esav’s family tree in Bereishis 36, replete with many intimations of incest and other illicit relationships (see Mizrachi 36:2). According to the New York...
Science, Blinded
“Just as ordinary, pig-headed and unreasonable as anybody else” was the eminent twentieth century psychologist H.J. Eysenck’s judgment of scientists. “And their unusually high intelligence,” he added, “only makes their prejudices all the more...
Nothing Too Challenging For Torah
Larger than life challenges to Torah values can be met in two different ways. We can prudently retreat, placing the sanctity of what is most important to us ahead of all other needs and...
Lucky Loser
Contests aren’t really my thing. I don’t buy lottery tickets or wager on sports (or, for that matter, even know much about them; until recently I thought Miami Heat was, well, a straightforward description,...