Israel’s 73rd Independence Day was an annual reminder of as close to a miracle as it gets. If for no other reason than it actually happened. So many Jews tried very hard to prevent it. It is all the more amazing if we consider that here we are, many years later, with Israeli society so fragmented and its politicians unable to…
General Topics
What is an Omer?
No, not the town in the Negev! The Biblical Omer refers to the sheaf of barley that was brought to the Temple, the day after Pesach, to mark the beginning of the new agricultural year. The first crop was the start of the harvest season. The Torah commands counting seven weeks, forty-nine days, from the day after Pesah until the wheat and first fruit…
Big and Little Lies
The culture we live in nowadays is one of lies. The truth is that it has always been thus even if at certain stages, the lies have been more venal and destructive than others. Ancient monarchs swore to defend and protect their citizens and promised victory when they knew they had neither the capacity nor the intention of doing so.…
Missing Children
One of the darkest episodes in the history of Israel is the ghastly story of the missing children of poor immigrants from Arab lands, airlifted to Israel (on the Wings of Eagles project) in the early years of State . Suddenly Israel had to cope with a massive influx of hundreds of thousands of refugees from very poor and often isolated communities. It…
Freedom
The New York Review of Books has recently devoted a lot of space to a review of “The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King” by Peniel E. Joseph. In the current context of Black slavery and its ramifications, I found some interesting parallels (and differences) between the Jewish and the American Black…
Who is a Jew?
Why is there such a fuss over the Israeli Supreme Court’s decision to allow converts to Judaism, as defined by the Reform and Conservative movements, to qualify for Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return? It makes no sense to me at all. It is a conflation of two quite separate issues, the Civil Law of the State of Israel and…