As I Watch From Afar
How does one cope with the pain, sitting here in New York, while at this moment, thousands of miles away, our beautifully pure, and purely beautiful, Yerushalayim is being traumatized? Yerushalayim, whose streets and...
Taking Care of Our Bodies: Making Time for Our Souls
Many years ago, my rosh yeshiva remarked of avid joggers: They are running in order to live longer. But they have no idea what they are living for. In the secular world, we see...
Newton on Kodshim, or 53 Shopping Years Left Until Apocalypse
It sure seems like the Borei Olam has a wonderful sense of humor. Just as Dick Dawkins and his fellow best-selling nihilists were riding high, selling books like hotcakes the better to worship their...
Friendly Coverage — It Can Be Done
A few weeks ago, a reporter for the Florida Times-Union called with a few questions about sheitels, the wigs worn by married Orthodox women to cover their natural hair. The result is this morning’s...
Chalk one up for Olmert
To judge from opinion polls, most Israelis would be hard-pressed to name one action of the Olmert government that they support. Well, I can: the appointment of Professor Daniel Friedmann as Justice Minister. The...
The Protest That Fizzled
What if the Palestinian lobby threw a party, and no one came? They did, and that’s pretty much what happened. The fortieth anniversary of the Six-Day War was supposed to be marked last weekend...
Twice Duped
Note: This post contains what some may regard as more than their minimum daily requirement of sarcasm. Personally, I regard this as healthy facetiousness towards deserving recipients. But if you are facetiousness-sensitive (or have...
Torah Extremism and its Opposite
Barry Goldwater, famously declared in his acceptance speech at the 1964 Republican convention, “. . . [E]xtremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! . . . [M]oderation in hte pursuit of justice...
Negating the Past; Dishonoring the Present
In general, I prefer not to write pieces in the form “see the difference between my son and the son of my father-in-law.” For one thing, what is sometimes known as Orthodox triumphalism seldom...
Remembering May 1967
Only once during my childhood did a television ever violate the sanctum of our family dining room. For the two weeks leading up to the Six Day War, a small TV stood on the...