Our task on Yom Kipur is to spend time thinking about where we stand in this world. Who are we? What are we? Every year we should go through this cathartic experience. This painful process of self-examination. In my case, it is all the more necessary and painful, because I really am a crazy, mixed-up kid. I live in two…
Author: Jeremy Rosen
Kaddish as Prayer and Confession
The Kaddish prayer has become popular to the point of cliché in Jewish culture and religious practice. Whether in the original Aramaic and Hebrew or transliterated into English and other languages, most Jews are to some degree or another familiar with its refrains. This is as much to do with its association with the rituals of mourning as it is…
Havdalah: Does It Separate or Combine? A Memoir and a Legacy
Some three hundred of us crowded into the hall of the stately mansion that American railway magnate Jay Gould had built on his estate on the banks of the River Thames, south of Oxford. Since 1953, it had been home to a Jewish Boarding School called Carmel College. Carmel had been founded in 1948 by my father, Rabbi Dr. Kopul…
Intersectionality: The New False God
When young people arrive at college, nowadays, they are likely to be confronted by a new, dogmatic orthodoxy. It has nothing to do directly with religion, but has all the negative hallmarks of fundamentalism: my way or no way. It is the theory of intersectionality. This says, in a nutshell, that every form of oppression must unite us all in…
Torah MiSinai and Biblical Criticism: Rising to the Full Challenge
Biblical Criticism challenges a traditional dogma that all the text of the Torah that we have in our possession today was written down by Moses on the instruction of God during one brief historical period over three thousand years ago. Does this mean that it is incompatible with the belief of Torah Min Hashamayim (Torah from Heaven)? Certainly, the Torah can be from heaven even if it is not from Moses. But what about Torah MiSinai? Does accepting the findings of academic biblical scholarship mean that it is necessarily incompatible with the idea of Torah MiSinai? This essay explores the possibility that the two worldviews are more complementary than many Jews seem to think.
The Time of the Year
This month before the Yamim Noraim, Days of Awe, is the time to start thinking about our souls rather than our politics. I have always loved words, their sounds and their meanings, in Hebrew and English. So that when I reflect on myself and ideas that I value, the first thing I do is examine what I mean by the…