More than the calf wants to suck, the mother wants to suckle. Talmud Pesachim 112a It’s Chanukah time! Consumerism has gone mad. We ape the rest of the world and we overindulge in an orgy of unnecessary spending, spoiling, and waste. Before my children complain that I am the worst overindulgent grandparent on the planet, hear me out, because this…
Author: Jeremy Rosen
Others
I recently watched the debate between arch atheist Richard Dawkins and believing Oxford mathematician John Lennox and found myself alienated from both. And it struck me once again with satisfaction and self-validation, how I do not fit in anywhere completely. Sadly, there are others who turn this into a problem. In the case of Dawkins it was not his critique…
Conor Cruise O’Brien, 1917-2008
Conor Cruise O’Brien, who died December of last year at the ripe old age of 91, was, as one cynic once said, “An Irishman who wanted to be a Jew.” This was not only because he was not anti-Semitic in a rabidly anti-Semitic world, but also a supporter of Israel. He was something of a hero to me, a benchmark…
Contraception
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…
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…