A week ago, I gave a Zoom talk for the Scottish Jewish Archive center. I spoke about my experiences as the rabbi of the largest Jewish Congregation in Scotland, the Giffnock and Newlands Hebrew Congregation, between 1968 and 1971. It was my first full-time position as a rabbi after I returned from my studies in Jerusalem, and it was an amazing…
General Topics
1848
The course of human civilization, if one can use that term, has progressed and continues to, in a series of slow cycles. The German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) introduced the now well-known process of change. A thesis, a positive step forward in human affairs that always provokes an antithesis, a reaction, a step backward. Then comes a synthesis, the fusion of the two…
The Lost Ark
So many people love conspiracy theories, fantasies, and lost causes. Best-selling books and movies focus on myths of missing people, cities, and treasures such as Atlantis, Treasure Island. And going further back in time, to the Golden Fleece or the Ten Lost Tribes. Christianity of course is the champion of fantasies and relics. For centuries they searched for the Holy…
Purim or Poor them.
Purim is the happiest and craziest day in the Jewish calendar and the only festival that celebrates an event in the Diaspora. But is it really? According to tradition, the story of Purim and the Book of Esther date to the early Persian period somewhere in the 5th century BCE. The story is of a naïve, drunken, male chauvinist, incompetent Persian…
Darkness
It is almost a year since we first got an inclining of the disastrous Covid19. No one, not even the holy World Health Organization had any idea of how serious it was or how it would spread with it so much death, pain, and gloom. There has been a lot of talk of darkness. If it were just uncertainty, one…
The greatest rabbi in the West
In the latest edition of the Brooklyn Jewish journal Hakirah, there is a fascinating article on Rav Joseph Ber Soloveitchik (1903 -1993) by David. P. Goldman entitled The Rav’s Uncompleted Grand Design. Goldman himself is a Renaissance man. An economist, a musicologist, an expert on China, a columnist as Spengler, a scholar. But this blog is not about him. It is about JB,…