In 1286 the greatest rabbi of his time, Meir of Rothenburg, was on his way to the Land of Israel. As life had become so unbearable in the Rhineland as the Crusades swept through and brought wave after wave of Jew hatred in their wake, like many Jews of the time, he wanted to make a new life for himself…
General Topics
Fanaticism
I have fond memories of the years I spent studying in Meah Shearim, in Jerusalem. That quaint quarter of Ottoman courtyards that housed ultra-Orthodox Jews was tucked away over a hill from the main city streets and down into a valley that once was the border between Jewish Jerusalem and Arab, by the border post known as the Mandelbaum Gate.…
The IKEA Sucah
Once upon a time we were a rural, agricultural people. Our founding forebears left the corrupt big city world of Nimrod, Babylon and Ur and migrated to the Land of Canaan (via Kurdistan). There, for practical reasons, they went back to a nomadic tent life. Abraham’s nephew Lot couldn’t handle the camping life. He needed his gold-plated faucets, so he…
Rubashkin and Yom Kipur
You might have heard the name Sholom Rubashkin. He is a Lubavitcher Chasid and an entrepreneur who built up a series of apparently successful businesses which enabled him to become a very generous and high-profile benefactor of Orthodox charities in the USA. His best known business, Agriprocessors, based in Postville, Iowa, was, in its time, the biggest provider of kosher…
Why do we act the way we do?
Philosophers are divided over the ethical question of why humans behave the way they do. There are and have been different theories, “labels” such as “utilitarianism” or “moral imperative”. None is without its strengths and weaknesses. That is precisely why the debate burns as fiercely as ever. Log onto Harvard Professor Michael Sandel’s excellent series for a wonderful free online…
Israel’s Survival
These are worrying times for Israel. When wasn’t? The peace treaties were never popular in the Arab world. There was always rabid anti-Semitism throughout the Middle Eastern media. Alliances in the Middle East are unraveling. When Turkey was a secular state, it established close military and economic ties, but then Erdogan decided that if Europe wasn’t going to welcome Turkey,…