One Good Deed…
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.
Quality Counts More than Size
Few ideas exercise such superficial appeal as the belief that the major threat to the Jewish people today is our small and ever declining numbers. And few ideas are ultimately more counterproductive and potentially...
What Uri Benefeld Has to Teach Us All
Uri Benenfeld was called to the Torah for the first time this past Shabbos. On the face of it, that does not sound so remarkable; no doubt many Jewish boys had their first aliyah...
The Israel Lobby — Missing in Action
In their 2007 book The Israel Lobby, Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt argued that there exists a loose coalition of groups that attempts to steer American policy in a pro-Israel direction at a...
Snatching Shabbos Victory From the Jaws of Defeat
[Rabbi Ilan Feldman, rav of Beth Jacob Cong. in Atlanta (and son of Cross-Currents senior blogger Rabbi Emanuel Feldman) sent this letter to the dejected rabbanim of the Baltimore community after the JCC board...
Dear Esther And Fellow Travellers
by Rabbi Dovid Landesman First of all, my thankful appreciation to all of you for what turned out to be a stimulating, open and civil exchange of ideas in response to my posting The...
Response to an Anti-Zionist Reader
One Esther has taken part in a lively discussion occassioned by Rabbi Landesman’s recent guest column. Recently, she issued a challenge: Now I’m going to put a question to you, Rabbi Adlerstein and commenters:...
Susan Boyle
Reports have it that she did it again, turning in another magnificent performance on Britain’s Got Talent. Boyle is the kind of frumpy looking 47 year old with unkempt hair who elicited snickers from...
Election Night Breakage
Tuesday, at about 11 PM, I walked into a gathering of the hopeful, awaiting the results of a special statewide election. I’m not terribly involved with the political process – my day job leaves...
Words of Peace, Words of Truth Part One: Rabbi Lamm Takes Off His Gloves
One of the first times that I heard Rabbi Norman Lamm speak, he held forth on two different ways that Megilas Esther could be read: as a happy set of coincidences that unseated one...