All parents have to go through the “which school” agony, often several times for every child. For many parents it is a double agony, because the issue is not simply one of what choice will most affect a child’s career, but how that choice will affect a child’s soul as well. The first question is what the priorities are. In…
General Topics
Human Apes
The Australian philosopher Peter Singer is well known for his utilitarian arguments based on the principle of the greatest good for the greatest number. He is perhaps “notorious” for his attack on “specieism”, which posits a fundamental difference between humans and animals. His argument was that we cannot draw a moral line between humans and animals. Not surprisingly, he became…
I Accuse
J’Accuse! was the title of Emile Zola’s condemnation of French anti-Semitism in the Dreyfus affair. I accuse human beings who ought to know better of abrogating their responsibility to other human beings. From Cain’s story we learn that humans are capable of gratuitous violence. And here we are thousands of years later and still almost every day brings another story…
Mediation
The reviving clash between religion and the civil state is gaining in heat, but now in reverse. The flash point, of course, is the issue of Sharia law and whether it should have any place in Western democratic legal systems. In parts of the USA, laws have been passed banning Sharia from having any role whatsoever, and in the UK,…
Rabbi Lior and Torat HaMelech
We like to pride ourselves, we Jews, that our Orthodox firebrands aren’t as violent as the Muslims. The more Orthodox you get in Islam, the more Jihad turns from peaceful to violent. But the more Orthodox in Judaism, the more the tendency toward the spiritual and the passive (Chasidic pyromaniacs excluded). The exceptions to this rule are the rabbis of…
UK Chief Rabbi
It’s amusing to an outsider, as I now am, to observe the interest in the UK over a new Chief Rabbi. Ben Elton, author of Britain’s Chief Rabbis and the Religious Character of Anglo-Jewry 1880-1970, wrote an article in the Jewish Chronicle recently in which he contrasted different styles of Chief Rabbis and argued that the next one, instead of…