Women Rabbis

The issue of women rabbis in Orthodox Judaism has come to the fore again. This time, it has come through a petition before the Israeli Supreme Court on sexual discrimination in religious affairs. Read more

What a mess we made!

The Fast of the Seventeenth of Tammuz we have just passed, initiates a three-week period of mourning for the loss, twice, of Jerusalem and the Temple. Read more

Statues and Idols

All of a sudden it has become fashionable in the USA to take down or demolish statues. There is a case to be made that none of them should have been put up in the first place. Read more

More on prayer

We are living in a fraught, unpredictable world of conflicting values and policies.  So I am returning to an earlier post about prayer. Read more

Wellesley Tudor Pole

Plagues often bring out the soothsayers and those who predict the end of days. Why else is Nostradamus still popular? Read more

Jeffrey Epstein and Maimonides

I needed distraction from hypocrisy, politics, demonstrations, and looting, this past week, so I watched a series on Netflix called “Filthy Rich.” Read more

Passion

What has primitive medieval antisemitism got to do with us, here, now? Read more

Ruth and Shavuot

The Book of Ruth, which is read on the Festival of Shavuot, is one of the shortest books in the Bible. Read more

Prayer in the time of COVID-19

The great advantage of having to pray alone during this period of lockdown is that one can actually take the time to pay attention to the words being said and to focus on their meaning and relevance (rather than keeping up with the congregation). Read more

May 8th, 1945

May 8^th VE Day is the anniversary of the end of the Second World War in 1945. It marks the final defeat of the Nazis and an end to the worst crime against humanity in the history of the world. Read more

Yeshayahu Leibowitz

My nephew Dov, a philosopher, scholar and rabbi of YAKAR Jerusalem, sent me a brilliant essay he recently published entitled “ On Social Distancing and deontology.” Read more

Israel and the Diaspora

As we approach Israel’s independence day, the relationship between Israel and the Diaspora remains ambivalent. Read more

Religion and COVID-19

There has been a great deal of negative publicity which religious communities in Israel and the United States were disregarding state and medical laws about social distancing. Read more

Pesach was always intended to be a challenge – To our way of life and our values.

Egypt, the most advanced civilization of its time, was being challenged by a single man with a different way of looking at things. Read more

A walk in the park

This past Shabbat, I went for a walk around Central Park. It was a beautiful day. The air was cool and fresh.  The sun was out and I was feeling good. Read more

The Economist

I think there’s been enough written about the virus crisis. Here is something less serious, to relieve the tension. Read more

Covid? Don’t Despair!

We are living under conditions that we have never experienced before. Read more

Eating an idol

Eating plays a very important part in Jewish rituals, every day of the year. Read more

Poor Him

Purim. Poor Him. But “poor” who? Ahasuerus the drunken incompetent sop of a passive king? Vashti the deposed queen? Perhaps all the virgins corralled into the king’s harem? Esther, the Metoo# nice Jewish girl who had to sleep with the king and face the chance that if she failed to please him she would be denied the starring role and end up an extra in the King’s seraglio? Or Mordechai whose refusal to bow to Haman (thus offending the express command of the King) and disobeying the king’s command not to appear at court in sackcloth, put the whole of the Jewish community at risk? Should we feel sorry for Bigtan and Teresh the incompetent plotters? Or is Haman, who overreached in his quest for power, driven by ambition and hatred, ended with his ten sons strung up on a scaffold? Take your pick. And people do. Read more

Vilem Flusser

I met the Jewish Czech philosopher, Vilem Flusser, at a conference on Contemporary Judaism and Zionism convened by Chief Rabbi Immanuel Jackobovits in London in 1980. He stood out in a gathering of rabbis and academics. Despite the differences in our backgrounds, age, and religious commitment, I felt a very strong bond with him.  His eyes sparkled with delight in challenging accepted ideas. Like me, he was a maverick. Read more

Jewish Names

We Jews are hyper-sensitive. Recently, several people have told me how embarrassed they are that Jewish names are so prominent in the current spate of legal cases involving sexual abuse. Read more

Deborah

I have always been fascinated by the Biblical Deborah. Not the one in Genesis, but the most impressive one in the Book of Judges. Read more

Jewish Tree Huggers

 On Monday we celebrate the New Year for trees! Yes, we were tree huggers long before it became fashionable. Where did we get it from? Read more

My problem with religion

Marx was right. Religion is the opiate of the masses. And Freud was right, too, that religion is wish-fulfilment and satisfies the need for a father figure. Read more

Erich Fromm

Erich Fromm, was one of the most influential psychiatrists of the last century. He was educated in Germany. When the Nazis came to power in 1934, he moved to Switzerland and then on to New York. Read more

Genius & Anxiety by Norman Lebrecht

Genius and Anxiety: How Jews changed the World 1847-1947 by Norman Lebrecht, is the best, popular Jewish interest book in years. Read more

Antisemitism

The Bible says that poverty will never cease from the earth. Sadly, hatred and prejudice will never cease either. Some hatreds are more widespread and persistent than others. Of these cultural and religious hatreds, antisemitism has always been the most persistent and widespread. Read more

Bulawayo

In the summer of 1966, I was studying in the great Yeshiva of Mir in Jerusalem. One day, I received a call from Rabbi Professor Dr. Louis Rabinowitz, former Chief Rabbi of South Africa and then Vice Mayor of Jerusalem.

Read more

Chanukah and Xmas

To the memory of Dr. Daniel Cammerman, a good, brilliant person, and a much-admired and respected pediatrician, taken tragically too soon from us. May his memory be a blessing.

This week I was asked by a non-Jewish friend, whether atonement plays a part in Chanukah as it does in Xmas. At first, I did not understand the question. But then it got me thinking of the differences between the two festivals. Read more

Better angels

Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg said that “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Read more

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