Modern Orthodox or Chassidic?
Last week, I was asked to make a shidduch (dating) enquiry, something that occurs on a very regular basis. For the uninitiated, a shidduch enquiry happens after someone I advise has been proposed a...
Chemotherapy As a Metaphor
No one in their right mind would knowingly ingest poison. Unless, of course, he or she was diagnosed with the dreaded disease and the doctors prescribed chemotherapy. But even after the decision has been...
Not a Doctor’s Decision
A Winnipeg case currently winding its way to its grim conclusion pits the children of Samuel Golubchuk against doctors at the Salvation Army Grace General Hospital. According to the pleadings, Golubchuk’s doctors informed his...
Living and Working Together
Jonathan Rosenblum previously speculated in these pages that there are advantages to people living in religiously mixed neighborhoods. Another CC contributor, Rabbi Emmanuel Feldman, made the same point earlier this week in the Jerusalem...
Money Matters
The ADVA Institute has just issued it latest report on Israel’s deepening income gap. According to the report, nearly one in five wage earners are living below the poverty line. Typically, the release of...
Outside the Pale – Responding to Readers
Let’s say a person lives in Williamsburg, sports a shtreimel and long, curled peyos, and his father was the gabbai for many years in Rav Yoelish’s beis medrash. All his forebears in recent memory...
Modern Marriage
Ever since the Sabbath after Sukkot, when the communal synagogue reading of the Torah began anew, I haven’t been able to attend a Jewish wedding without thinking about the Netziv’s unsettling, if simple, observation....
Plane Lessons
For those who enjoy studying their fellow human beings, there are few better laboratories than a long flight. Indeed the opportunities for such study are one of the few pleasures of air travel, especially...
Spam Attack!
We have been fighting off an unusually heavy barrage of spam to our comments section that has been going on for about a week. In the process, it is likely that a few comments...
Leading From Behind
This week’s Torah reading sees Yaakov at the end of his life dispensing blessings to each of his sons. There is a comparable passage right at the end of the Torah, in which Moshe...