An article in an Orthodox Jewish paper recently argued that couples should use contraceptives for the first year of marriage so as to get used to each other before children arrive. This will probably not strike many of you are either remarkable, unusual or in any way worthy of a second thought. Except that officially in Orthodox circles contraception is…
Author: Jeremy Rosen
Who Is A Jew?
How come the High Courts of England are now deciding who is and who is not a Jew? The simple answer is that the rabbinic authority of the United Synagogues of London arrogantly believed that everyone else had to fit in with them, rather than that they should accommodate others. Most power and bureaucracy makes this mistake. In the West,…
Halloween
For me, November conjures up Guy Fawkes Night. “Remember, remember, the 5th of November.” That was when some English Catholics set up a fellow called Guy Fawkes to blow up the Houses of Parliament, while King James I and the English Lords Temporal and Spiritual were inside, so that that they could remove Protestantism from the British Isles forever. Lunatic…
Tefillin
Every weekday morning after I have washed and dressed and, unless it is a fast day, drunk a glass of water, I put on my tefillin. They that, for reasons I cannot understand, are called phylacteries. The word still sounds like a form of contraception to me because when, as a fourteen year old, I saw an advert for prophylactics…
The Bomb
In my youth I marched against “the bomb” in the annual Easter marches from the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire (UK) to Trafalgar Square in London. We were genuinely worried that the Russians and the Americans would drop atomic bombs on each other and in the ensuing cataclysm we would all be wiped off the face of…
Demographics
You may have seen a video doing the rounds, The Islamic Tidal Wave, about the demographics of survival and the clear message that within our lifetime Islam will have conquered the world through its birth rate. Of course it is a Christian scare video to get good believers to rabbit away to save the Kingdom of Christ. In its over-simplicity…