It’s a sign of our times that the New York Times can devote a serious op-ed to the fact that God is in decline because He, She, or It was googled less than few years ago. According to the author, pornography searches are up 83%, heroin is up 32%, and churches are down 15%. The top Google search that includes…
General Topics
Everything, Something, or Nothing – Thoughts for Yom Kipur 2015
During the nineteenth century there were two ideological movements that swept the western world. For want of a better term, I will call them universalism and particularism. Universalism was the message of Marxism, which spawned socialism and communism. Particularism was the ideology of nationalism. Religions caught between the two split into rival factions. From 1848 onwards there were fierce civil…
Repentance
When I was a child in England, I often used to see men and women standing at street corners holding placards saying such things as, “The End of the World is Nigh! Repent before it is loo late!” or some variation on that theme. It struck me as silly. Even in the era of the atomic threat, I had much…
Gluckel of Hameln, Champion of Business Ethics
Most of us have heard of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, but how many know about a nice Jewish lady called Gluckel of Hamelin? She lived some 300 years ago, when Jews in Europe struggled to survive as outsiders and outcasts in an inhospitable “no man’s land”. They were at the mercy and whim of rival political and ecclesiastical powers,…
The End of Our World
Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of humans around the world are on the move, political refugees and economic migrants. They are already and will continue to radically change the character of the societies they are moving into. Throughout history humans have always migrated, from land to land and from continent to continent. They were pushed by climate change, by…
Rav Lichtenstein, z”l
Those who follow me will know how much scorn I pour on abuses of religion and religious authority. I despair at the pettiness and outright vindictiveness of the Chief Rabbinate in Israel and its utter refusal to follow the Biblical exhortation to “understand the soul of the stranger”. I am alienated by extremism of all kinds, religious and political, including…