Where Less Can Be More
“Can she have a cookie with a Pentagon-K on the box?” the voice on the phone asked and, after receiving my polite but negative response (a Pentagon-K?—now the Defense Department’s in the kashrus business?...
Postscript to a Tale of Rabbinic Wisdom
Quite a number of readers voiced surprise at my earlier piece that that a get could be valid despite the husband’s obvious expectation of a payoff that never came. (Because they overlapped, we only...
Can An Animal Change Its Tza’ar Ba’alei Chaim Spots?
Can practices fully accepted halachically become unacceptable because of changed technology? According to Israel’s Chief Rabbinate, it seems so. It has decided that methods of handling animals before shechitah that were used in the...
Esav and the New Modern Family
The closest we get to soap opera in Chumash is Esav’s family tree in Bereishis 36, replete with many intimations of incest and other illicit relationships (see Mizrachi 36:2). According to the New York...
Double-Blind Science and the Church of Agnosticism
Rabbi Natan Slifkin recently posted a response to Rabbi Shafran’s essay from yesterday. Unfortunately, he misrepresents what Rabbi Shafran had to say, which was entirely reasonable — and on target. Rabbi Shafran said that...
Science, Blinded
“Just as ordinary, pig-headed and unreasonable as anybody else” was the eminent twentieth century psychologist H.J. Eysenck’s judgment of scientists. “And their unusually high intelligence,” he added, “only makes their prejudices all the more...
Nothing Too Challenging For Torah
Larger than life challenges to Torah values can be met in two different ways. We can prudently retreat, placing the sanctity of what is most important to us ahead of all other needs and...
Lucky Loser
Contests aren’t really my thing. I don’t buy lottery tickets or wager on sports (or, for that matter, even know much about them; until recently I thought Miami Heat was, well, a straightforward description,...
The Wisdom of a Classic Shul Rov
I couldn’t resist sharing this wonderful reminiscence of a father by his son. Rabbi Saul Berman penned this recently upon the occassion of his father’s,z”l,34th yahrzeit. It is published with permission of the author....
Something Fishy About Anisakis?
The current halachic rage – the status of fish known to host worms – presents two layers of fascination to me. From the very beginning, I recognized that how you generally understand the intersection...