Napoleon reported on a conversation he had with Polish serfs about liberty. “Certainly we should like to have it very much; but who will feed, clothe, and house us?” We are no longer amazed...
Almost always, I shy away from mixing business with blogging pleasure. Too many people, I fear, would just not appreciate how I spend a good deal of my working day. Essentially, my job at...
You’ll log many a mile to find someone more disapproving than I am of the anger and vilification that characterize so much of American political discourse. But to lay the tragic January 8 shooting...
From, of all things, a Facebook friend:
I note with great sadness the petirah last week of Rabbi Zechariah Fendel z”l. In the days before Artscroll made everything accessible to us, Rabbi Fendel was one of the first to understand the...
Last week, Sarah Palin went from looking very bad to looking very victimized. How and why that happened may shed some light on the conduct of an internecine dispute in progress on organ donation...
On Brain Death, Cardiac Death, Defining Halakhic Death, and Trying to Hurt Torah Jews Who Disagree with You Dov Fischer Fair-minded people are torn by the subject of when a dying person has passed...
One of my wittier friends commented that my recent exchange with Avi Shafran on President Obama’s Israel policy struck him as a mental health issue. “I mean its not like you and Avi are...
A response to my piece on Meyer Dagan was too thought-provoking to languish in a combox, so I am elevating it to full post status: Dear Rabbi Adlerstein: I was very moved by your...
Making the best of a bad situation is almost a capsule summary of galus history. One tool that we have used effectively is turning every new challenge into a forum for Torah discussion. The...