We are used to hearing the contemporary return to Judaism by the unaffiliated over the last 50 years referred to as a movement. If we are to define a movement as something which provides a grand idea that has a life of its own and is then picked up by all kinds of people
Rabbi Ysoscher Katz responded to the alleged welfare fraud and arrest of seven Lakewood couples in a timesofisrael.com blog (Understanding Lakewood, Understanding Ourselves). Rabbi Katz essentially claims that Chareidim get stuck on minority halachik opinions from centuries ago which frame their attitudes and lead to their
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
