Recidivist Repentance
It’s easy to feel disheartened, even despondent, as Rosh Hashanah approaches, at the realization that some of the things we did teshuvah for last year are things we need to repent for again this...
CS Lewis, Elul and the Shofar
Somebody you know has read The Screwtape Letters. He or she may not admit it, however, because reading the work of the most successful Christian apologist in the twentieth century will not win friends...
Kashering Elephants and Donkeys
I appreciate that my friend of many years Rabbi Menken agrees with me that treating political affiliations like sports teams is wrong, as is attaching ourselves to political positions (or parties, as I wrote...
Orthodoxy’s Smashing Success and Lurking Challenges
In Does Orthodox Explosion Signal Doom for Conservative and Reform?, Dr. Steven M. Cohen and other researchers present the bold reality of robust Orthodox growth and dramatic non-Orthodox atrophy and population decline, based upon...
Rosh Hashanah Shiur Now Available For Download
As threatened, I delivered my annual Rosh Hashanah shiur for women yesterday. OK, it did use Rosh Hashanah as an excuse to talk almost exclusively about tefillah, particularly the structure of the weekday Shacharis....
Annual Rosh Hashanah Shiur
I’m announcing this one with embarrassment. I had hoped to have completed a move to Yerushalayim by now, but it hasn’t happened. (We have not yet rented out our house in LA, and that...
Statues of Limitation
It’s safe to say that many of us are less than exercised over the public debate about Confederate-era statues on public lands. It may animate those with a dog in the race, so to...
Kate Millett’s Legacy
She may rest in peace, but not the many whose lives became road-kill to her revolutionary zeal. She plied her doctoral dissertation into the best-selling Sexual Politics, roundly critiqued for its shallowness and inaccuracy....
More on Smartphones
Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein’s article, How Bad Are Smartphones?, provides much food for thought. The often unnoticed yet acute damage which smartphone addiction causes needs to be considered and addressed. I would like to expand...
Houston Relief: A Sidebar on Community
As so often happens, systems under stress yield the most information. Think of supercolliders giving us the best guesses as to the composition of “ordinary” matter. Or the really strange cases in the gemara...