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...
Houston Relief: Update
Lots of hungry people in Houston are now being fed. As reported here earlier, the Dallas community assumed responsibility for providing fresh meals, coordinating with HKA – Houston Kashruth Association. Three caterers in Dallas...
The Peril of Partisanship
Among contemporary American life’s many negative influences on Torah-conscious Jews is a subtle one that is generally overlooked. We don’t need reminders of the pernicious impact of the surrounding society’s denial of eternal truths,...
How Bad Are Smartphones?
Chances are that you don’t need me for this. You already understand that the ubiquitous smartphone, to the naked eye at least, has wreaked havoc with human communications, with attention spans, with happiness itself....
Report From Houston
I asked Rabbi Yehoshua Wender, mara d’asra of Young Israel of Houston, for a status report for his community. He offered the remarks he sent out to his own shul; they capture what his...
Death of a Slogan
“Le roi est mort, vive le roi!” That’s the famous French declaration that was traditionally made when a monarch had breathed his last: “The king is dead. Long live the king!” Recent days have...
Name Game
A stylistically different but similar piece to a recent Hamodia one about “Open Orthodoxy”‘s dropping of that self-description, written for the Forward’s readership, can be read here.
The Bond of Shared Targethood
A rumination on black-Jewish relations, born of the recent Charlottesville rally, can be read here.
True Jews
You may know something about the Sicarii, or Sikari’im (or Sikrikim), the radical Jewish faction at the time of the destruction of the Second Beis Hamikdash. What you may not know is that their...
The Chofetz Chaim and the Eclipse
Thanks to a prominent US rabbi who wishes to stay anonymous, Cross-Currents is pleased to offer a translation of the Shmuel Pliskin article on the Chofetz Chaim’s reaction to a solar eclipse that he...