Rabbi Avraham Edelstein

The Chinuch tells us a great principle: our actions affect and condition our internal, spiritual reality. G-d therefore commanded us to make a place that would be perfectly pure and holy where, both by going there and doing the things we do there, we could purify our own thoughts. For example, the

Until now, things seemed to be getting slowly better in our world. A post-Holocaust world made anti-Semitism a bad word in Europe and America and the Six Day War turned Israel into being a hero. That is no longer the case. Israel is vilified all over the world, and anti-Semitism is back in vogue in Europe. But the terror does not stop on

The following post is meant to generate discussion on a timely issue. Its purpose is to state the need for each organization to develop its own ethics protocol, rather than to suggest any particular authoritative document. People may violate ethical boundaries within an organization in ways that they would never do in their private... Read more »

Four Jews were killed in the Har Nof murders. Four were murdered in the supermarket in Paris. In both cases, a normal happening like this would have taken twenty to fifty lives. But God determined, with great exactitude, the specific lives, the circumstances, and the message to the world. The Har Nof murdered all lived in Israel. That made it personal for

1. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness is a novel about Belgium’s colonial rule in the Congo. The colonialist conquered with his sense of bringing civilization to the savages of Africa. But Conrad shows that much of this was merely an overlay of culture, lacking true moral depth. In some ways, the... Read more »

What resolutions should we make for the coming year after a year in which we Jews found ourselves in a war with Hamas, a war which triggered the greatest outbreak of naked anti-Semitism we have seen since the Second World War? While all this was happening, ISIS was busy slaughtering their own innocents, while thousands were being killed in Ukraine.

So much of the darkest evil has descended upon this earth all at once – ISIS, Hamas, the Syrian government, Boko Haram... It is clear that some of our assumptions about man have to be questioned. The core question is: What is the foundation of human morality? We need a system which can somehow ensure that the world aspires to goodness and not evil. We can't

Three years ago, on the very day when the American vice president was visiting Israel, the Israeli Ministry of the Interior made the mistake of announcing a stage of planning new houses in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo. The neighborhood is over the '67 borders, but it an integral part of Jewish Jerusalem and was never claimed by the Palestinians. Moreover, the area was not included in the freeze on settlements that the Israelis had

Tal Fortgang, a white, Jewish, Princeton freshman has written an essay, "Why I’ll Never Apologize for My White Male Privilege" which has caused quite a stir. He was objecting to "Check your privilege" as a reprimand: As a white male, he is where he is because he was born into privileges that do not apply to others. What Tal was objecting to was using "check your privilege" as a way "to strike down opinions

A giant has fallen and, like all of the great founders of the Baal Teshuva movement, he will never, can never, be replaced. Rabbi Meir Schuster was produced by his era, but he also shaped it. For over three decades, it was he who single-handedly filled many of the Baal Teshuva yeshivot. How does one sum up this man through whom hundreds began their