I have recently read “The Shah” by Abbas Milani 2011, and certain significant parallels strike me as very relevant today. As a senior army officer, Reza Shah Pahlavi ousted the old Qajar dynasty in 1925. He modelled himself on Kemal Ataturk and wanted to drag Iran out of the medieval grip of the Shia mullahs and transform Persia into a…
Selfie
The Oxford University Press is the nearest thing to an authoritative arbiter of the English language. English speakers, unlike the French, do not have an Academie to impose a centrally mandated straightjacket on language. Each year, however, they do decide on “Word of the Year.” This year it was “selfie” (or, as others claim, “selfy”). The word hit the news…
Nelson Mandela
I first became aware of Nelson Mandela in 1956. I was fourteen and a very disruptive teenager. My father was going on a fundraising tour of South Africa in support of Jewish education and he decided to take me with him in the hope of mitigating my rebelliousness. For much of the time, while my father was busy, I was…
Death
I have just had to try to comfort a family devastated by the loss of middle-aged siblings, barely months apart, after long debilitating illnesses and decline. It is so hard to see suffering, the living and the dying. For me it is made harder still by the desperation of those who seek any and all kinds of pseudo-religious, superstitious charms…
Jewish Meditation
In my youth the Beatles, notably George Harrison, introduced us to Transcendental Meditation and a variety of other Eastern religious practices. Yoga had been popular long before, of course, so had Rabindranath Tagore, whom my father read. If the practices were completely devoid of any outside religio-cultural association, there was no problem in trying them out, any more than fitness…
Limmud UK
The very first Limmud Conference was held at Carmel College in the UK during my time as principal. Alastair Falk, a teacher at Carmel, and some friends had been to a CAJE (Coalition for the Advancement of Jewish Education) in the USA and come back enthused by the range of participants, the enthusiasm, and the mood of commitment. Initially they…