Rosh Chodesh Nisan would seem a propitious time for a Kiddush Hashem. And one occurred this year, when a large group of Israeli anti-government protesters, mostly secular citizens aiming to “get in the face”...
A piece I wrote for the Forward about the Chametz Law in Israel can be read here. And a thought about the Haggadah and American history appeared today at Religion News Service, here. Chag...
Unity. The magical elixir for assuring Divine favor. When we are united, say Chazal, Hashem is with us even when we are sinners. Where does that leave us? We cannot remember a time of...
Genesis 1:27 declares: “Male and female He Created them.” And that is the sum total of what Judaism has to say about “gender identity.”
The shalsheles cantillation, expressed in a long, wavering series of notes, occurs only four times in the Torah. In three, the “wavering” may reflect a wavering of will. In Beraishis 19:16, Lot, about to...
Some faces in Israel ought to be turning lobster-red from shame, instead of gloating over Bibi and Sara dining at a non-kosher restaurant in London on Shabbos. The opposition piled on to Israel’s First...
Animal sacrifices begin not only the parsha and the sefer of Vayikra but the world as we know it. Because Noach was commanded to take extra animals of certain species on the ark for...
The kruvim, three-dimensional depictions of two winged childlike beings, a male and female, formed from the gold of the kappores, the cover of the aron, are described as “facing one another” (Shemos 37:9). The...
Our ancestors’ devotion, so soon after the revelation at Har Sinai, to a physical object, the egel hazahav, the golden calf, is rightly and remarkably confounding. Obviously, like so many of the Torah’s narratives,...
Most agricultural oils are produced from seeds. The olive is one of the few fruits that produce oil. And olive oil plays a major role in the Mishkan and Beis HaMikdash. It is a...
