A Hillel For Our Times
[YA – I do not have any easy way of verifying this as journalists are wont to do. I’ve received it in email form from diverse sources in the last few days. It is...
Accidents Don’t Happen
With time, those with open eyes come to recognize that life is peppered with strange, small ironies – “coincidences” that others don’t even notice, or unthinkingly dismiss. The famous psychiatrist Carl Jung puzzled over...
Lament, Loss, and Lesson (Hopefully) Learned
Even though almost a week has passed, the horror of the terrorist attack at Yeshivat Merkaz HaRav still lingers in my broken heart. The stories. The names. The pictures. It’s all just too much...
Why I am a Chasid of the Belzer Rebbe
by Rabbi Ron Yitzchok Eisenman, Kehillas Ahavas Yisrael, Passaic NJ As many of you remember, I have spent many a happy moment in the court of the Rebbe of Belz Shlita. Indeed, I once...
Letter from a Shiva Visitor
To my dear friends and family, Daniel and I just got back from paying a shiva call to the family of Segev Avichayil, the young boy murdered in the terrorist attack Thursday night. I...
Marvin Schick on Bans
For decades, Rabbi Marvin Schick has been the bulldog of Gedolei Torah in the English-language world. More than anyone else I can think of, Rabbi Schick’s columns presented the leadership of Torah luminaries in...
The Eight Kedoshim
Who can console us, for what is beyond consolation? The pictures of the eight kedoshim, the choicest korbanos that Klal Yisrael could offer, haunt us beyond words. I have forgotten which chronicler of the...
If you prick us, do we not bleed?
Some pupils at the Yesodey Hatorah girls’ high school not too far from where I live have attracted UK and international news coverage (see, for example, here, here, here and here) over their refusal...
What Counts (And What Doesn’t) In A Candidate
Barack Obama is black. Hillary Clinton is a woman. John McCain has hair and is clean shaven. So who’s a balding, bearded Jew like me supposed to support? If the question strikes you as...
A Hint of Jewish Unity
My brief stopover in Toronto last week happened to coincide with a solidarity rally for Sderot called by the Toronto Jewish Federation. As an Israeli citizen and a resident of Israel for almost three...