There is a serious battle going on in Israel, not against its external enemies or internal deficiencies, but over the issue of whether ultra-Orthodox young men should be able to escape military service by claiming that they are scholars. It was the first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, who bowed to pressure from the greatest rabbis of the generation to…
General Topics
Civil Marriage
Who opposes civil marriage? It seems that religions are the main campaigners against it. Despite my love affair with Judaism I am a strong advocate of separating State from Religion. There is a disconnect between a system based on Divine Revelation, conservatism, and giving authority to men and women who put faith above all else, and on the other hand…
Doctor David Granet of Glasgow
It is very hard for one generation to fully understand the zeitgeist and the unique circumstances of another. This is certainly true of Jewish life which has become increasingly polarized. Whether one approves or not, life in most Jewish communities today is very different than it was fifty years ago. I am reminded of the famous Greek Heraclitus, who argued…
Orthodoxy and The Internet
Last Yom Yerushalayim there was a huge Charedi gathering of some 50,000 “black hats” at Citi Field, the home of the New York Mets baseball team. An organization called Ichud HaKehillos LeTohar HaMachane (Union of Communities for the Purity of the Camp) raised $1.5 million for the massive rally to protest the “evils of the internet and the damages caused…
Sinai
There’s a Jewish internet dating service (amongst the many) called “Saw You at Sinai”. I guess its name derives from the famous argument of Yehudah Halevi in the Kuzari that what marked Judaism from the other monotheistic religions, such as Christianity and Islam, was that its core constitution and inspiration lay not in a private revelation that no one else…
Cardinal Pell’s Foot
The Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, Australia, Cardinal George Pell, recently took on the noted Atheist Richard Dawkins in a public debate, during the course of which he said of the ancient Jews that they were ”the poor, the little Jewish people, they were originally shepherds…stuck between these great powers” of their time, such as the Egyptians and Babylonians, and that…