Heart and Soul
Electroencephalographs measure electrical activity in the brain but nothing more. Who can possibly know what might be happening in the soul of a living human being?
Houston, We’ve Got A Problem!
by Rabbi Dovid Landesman I hate to always be the harbinger of discomforting tidings, but the older I get, the more pessimistic I become. Instead of being proud of the unprecedented growth of the...
The G-d Lover Within Us
by Rabbi Doron Beckerman In a previous post, I alluded to the fact that the current implementation of Kollel has “significant drawbacks”. Not being the focus of that essay, it seems that that that...
Why Torah Trumps the US Constitution
Obvious, you say. Perhaps to us. But these are the words of Justice Antonin Scalia, in a dissent from the Court ruling on the legal need for a judge to recuse himself from a...
Change Yourself; Change the World
Sometimes one hears a story that does not, at first, seem so remarkable, but the more one reflects upon it, the more lessons one discovers. A rosh yeshiva recently told me about an avreich...
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...