A Torah Personality’s Pain
Not everyday do you get a call from a Torah personality asking you to spend more time on the internet, rather than less. But that is just what happened to me a few days...
A Jewish “Connection”
Most people, asked if there was any specific Jewish connection to the recent horrific murder of 20 first-graders and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, would probably respond “Noah...
Nothing to be Nervous about Neuroscience
I’ve encountered two attitudes in our community to cutting edge neuroscience. Many react to it less love than root canal. Its presumptions to offer “natural” explanations for things previously seen as spiritual and mysterious...
An Antescript to Rabbi Feldman
Rabbi Ilan Feldman’s piece continues to dominate in the popularity race of the new issue, both in terms of numbers of downloads, and in the responses come in. One reader, whose identity I do...
Hospitals and Halacha
Rabbi Jason Wiener is a young rov who has done an outstanding job as the senior Jewish chaplain at Cedars-Sinai Hospital Center in Los Angeles. His penchant for serious treatment of halacha is obvious...
A Film Informs My Sh’ma
As a single young man in 1977, I once found myself in a science museum where I viewed a just released short film that – there’s really no other way to put it –...
Klal Perspectives: The Kiruv Issue
The second volume of Klal Perspectives begins with an issue that examines kiruv: where it is, and where it is going. Some of us thought that this would be a change of pace topic,...
The Time of Your Life
Similar advertisements abound, but this one took the cake. I’ve always been simultaneously amused and saddened by pitches for “high-end timepieces,” more accurately known as overpriced wristwatches. Amused, because the most intricate Swiss movements...
Hellenism, A Swedish Barbarian, and Chanukah
All men, claimed Heinrich Heine, the apostate German-Jewish poet, are either Jews or Greeks. For traditional Jews, the very essence of Chanukah is bound up in the struggle between those civilizations. An “art” exhibit...
To Err is Essential
Students of Daf Yomi will reach it on the seventh day of Chanukah, “it” being a particularly trenchant mishna in Mesechta Shabbos, considering that the following day, “Zos Chanukah,” is identified in the Jewish...