Where do we set the bar of observance for would-be converts? The row over standards waxes and wanes, but never quite disappears. A recent article in Tradition did not make the waves it should...
An e-mail arrived today from the president of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency appealing for money to enable the agency to stay afloat. I must admit that as a free subscriber to JTA’s daily news...
There is no gainsaying the beauty and appropriateness of Rabbi Chaim Dovid Zweibel’s letter to the son of Stephen Tyrone Johns. It demonstrates both the chochmah and lev of talmidei chachamim. There is also...
Upon his first visit to one of the liberated death camps, Allied Supreme Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “There are those who ask what are we fighting for. Let them come here and...
Electroencephalographs measure electrical activity in the brain but nothing more. Who can possibly know what might be happening in the soul of a living human being?
by Rabbi Dovid Landesman I hate to always be the harbinger of discomforting tidings, but the older I get, the more pessimistic I become. Instead of being proud of the unprecedented growth of the...
by Rabbi Doron Beckerman In a previous post, I alluded to the fact that the current implementation of Kollel has “significant drawbacks”. Not being the focus of that essay, it seems that that that...
Obvious, you say. Perhaps to us. But these are the words of Justice Antonin Scalia, in a dissent from the Court ruling on the legal need for a judge to recuse himself from a...
Sometimes one hears a story that does not, at first, seem so remarkable, but the more one reflects upon it, the more lessons one discovers. A rosh yeshiva recently told me about an avreich...
The awe-inspiring is all around us, if we care to look and think, and are not fooled into imagining that nature’s fantasticalness is a phantasm, the meaningless yield of random meetings of molecules.