I was studying in yeshiva in Israel in 1956 when Bar Ilan, which had been founded the year before, opened its campus. It was, at the time, a sort of Junior College built on American lines and with the support of American rabbis together with the Mizrachi Religious Zionist party in Israel. At first it was not taken very seriously…
General Topics
Apocalypto
Many Christians are devoted to the idea of Apocalypse. A catastrophe ends this evil world and replaces it with perfect bliss. It’s not that far removed from some of our own ideas of Messianism. It conveniently solves all the problems and relieves us of responsibility. So I wondered if Mel Gibson was going to follow his film about the end…
Get Out of Iraq
I was very much in favor of going into Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein and his nest of sadistic, genocidal, lunatics. Not because of his pathological hatred for Israel, but simply for humanitarian reasons, because of the way he was decimating Marsh Arabs, Kurds and Shiites, not to mention Iranians. At the time I was strongly against the Coalition tactics…
Reformative Judaism
I often attack the inconsistencies and abuses of Orthodox Judaism. But I must say, sometimes our problems do seem to pale into insignificance compared to those of other denominations! There was a time when Reform Judaism was the largest and most dynamic branch of Judaism in the United States of America. This was at a time when the movers and…
When is kosher kosher?
It is often said that a person is what he eats. Then I guess a person’s attitude to matters of food must say a lot about his religion. It is one of the great features of Judaism as a religion that it creates a framework for daily living that involves thinking and acting rather than just affirming vague ethical ideas…
Great Leaders?
Very few Jews, let alone others, have heard of him. A few weeks ago Dayan Eliezer Waldenberg, the author of the magisterial compilation of legal opinions, Tzitz Eliezer, died at the age of 89. He was, in my opinion the greatest living authority on Jewish Law with particular reference to science and medicine. He was my halachic mentor. But more…