The Song Was True
“The Man From Vilna” (Abie Rottenberg; Journeys IV) moved people to tears. Many people assumed that it belonged to the genre of stories that Rabbi Berel Wein calls ones “that may not have happened,...
Giving Up the Struggle for Life – Second Thoughts
[Please note an important clarification by the husband of the subject of the the article. It appears in the comments that follow the article.] She had become a palliative care physician, having survived a...
Geulah and Responsibility
Two Pesach motifs, each one individually difficult to understand, become even more strained when considered together. Chazal tell us that Bnei Yisrael had to be redeemed, in a sense, just then. They had descended...
How To Write A Proper Petition
Find attorneys who know the case, inside and out. Consult with frum attorneys, who know how words are taken by the people expected to read the petition, and what impressions about the Orthodox community...
How Not To Write a Petition
I received a few emails asking me to sign a petition asking for the release of Sholom Rubashkin for the first days of Pesach. Mr. Rubashkin has not yet been sentenced, and there are...
There are no basketball courts in Heaven
I don’t know what to do. Should I copy author Dovid Landesman’s joke at the beginning of the chapter entitled, “The Cowboy and the Beemer”? You’d laugh your heads off (I know, I’ve already...
Window to a Different Spirit
As a confirmed addict of anything written by the Bleichs, the first piece I looked at in the new issue of Jewish Action was Dr. Judy Bleich’s review of Ish Yehudi, the biography of...
What’s With The Fours?
Despite the late hour and exhaustion (not to mention wine), many a Jewish mind has wondered long and hard during a Passover Seder about all the Haggadah’s “fours.” Four questions, four sons, four expressions...
Early winner of Pesach sillyness award
I had the privilege of travelling around Israel with my daughter last week. We stopped at a museum shop which sells, among other things, Dead Sea creams and lotions. As we entered, I noticed...
The Achish Melech Gat Awards
by Dovid Landesman I have often speculated to myself whether cynicism, of which I have been blessed with an inordinate amount, is in any way an exemplary or positive middah and I should thus...