This week we have celebrated the New Month of Cheshvan. Sometimes it is called Mar Cheshvan because, so goes the official story, it is the only month with no special days and is therefore sad (Mar). They really liked anthropomorphisms in days gone by. So that is why we add the adjective. In reality it has more to do with…
Creation
There are a myriad issues and challenges that we all face every day. Coping with life can be exhausting and exhilarating. But needing to know when exactly the universe or the earth were created is surely is not amongst them. Some people choose to believe it all happened 5776 years ago precisely, either on Rosh Hashanah in the seventh month…
Two Day Festivals
Judaism began with 40 years of wandering in the desert, with plenty of time to celebrate festive days. Its calendar, based on both the solar and the lunar system, was the product of agricultural societies in the northern hemisphere. There was a commercial element, it is true, but nothing like the brute, mechanical, industrial societies that developed in the nineteenth century, which spawned…
Google God
It’s a sign of our times that the New York Times can devote a serious op-ed to the fact that God is in decline because He, She, or It was googled less than few years ago. According to the author, pornography searches are up 83%, heroin is up 32%, and churches are down 15%. The top Google search that includes…
Everything, Something, or Nothing – Thoughts for Yom Kipur 2015
During the nineteenth century there were two ideological movements that swept the western world. For want of a better term, I will call them universalism and particularism. Universalism was the message of Marxism, which spawned socialism and communism. Particularism was the ideology of nationalism. Religions caught between the two split into rival factions. From 1848 onwards there were fierce civil…
Repentance
When I was a child in England, I often used to see men and women standing at street corners holding placards saying such things as, “The End of the World is Nigh! Repent before it is loo late!” or some variation on that theme. It struck me as silly. Even in the era of the atomic threat, I had much…