It just never seems to end. The press publicizes yet another case of a rabbi and teacher guilty of abusing his position in a sexual way. The roll call in recent years is a depressing one. Twenty names come immediately to mind, this year alone, of very Orthodox men convicted of sexual abuse of women or children. And these are…
Belz and Women Drivers
There has been much neurotic outcry about the Belz Chasidic yeshiva in London (note, not in Israel) for issuing a ban on women driving and threatening to expel children from its schools if their mothers arrived to drop them off or pick them up in cars (which, under pressure, has now, thankfully been withdrawn). Forget that most Chasidic dynasties around…
American Pharoah
The Lubavitcher Rebbe won the Triple Crown at Belmont last Saturday when American Pharoah romped home in the Belmont Stakes at Belmont, New York, by five lengths, becoming the first horse to win the Triple Crown in 37 years. The owner is one Ahmed Zayat, once known in Cairo as an Egyptian Muslim, but now in the USA he is…
FIFA Corruption
You know someone is unsavory if Vladimir Putin defends him. Thank goodness Sepp Blatter, the recently reelected president of FIFA, has finally resigned. Or so it seems at the moment. On a scale of values, running a corrupt soccer cartel and stacking it with family and friends surely is not the worst crime of all. What he represents is not…
Zimbabwe & ISIS
In 1966 I was sitting in yeshiva in Jerusalem studying hard and all but oblivious to the outside world, when I was summoned to see Rabbi Louis Rabinowitz, former Chief Rabbi of South Africa, then retired to Jerusalem. He was a contemporary and friend of my late father and a mentor to me. He told me I should get a…
Prophets
Shavuot is the festival that commemorates not just the encounter between Moses and God on Mount Sinai but also the “revelation” of Torah. There are traditionally 70 ways of explaining (70 faces of) Torah. So how we understand what actually happened is, of course, subject to almost infinite variations, from fundamentalist literality through academic reconstruction on to absolute denial. And…