If I say that Marc Shapiro is one of the most important and influential committed religious Jews alive today, you might think me guilty of hyperbole. I assure you I am not. He has a Ph.D. from Harvard and directs the Weinberg Judaic Studies Institute at the University of Scranton, and he is the author of various books and articles…
General Topics
Purim Torah
In my student days, when I used to campaign for women’s rights, I thought that the Purim story was about the suffering of women. That drunk male numbskulls who got boozed up on excessive amounts of alcohol forced their smelly, priapic, testosterone-fueled bodies on unwilling, disadvantaged women. King Achashverosh was a typical male chauvinist pig. A lazy slob, a sybaritic…
Purim or Munich?
Purim is this coming week. It’s a story that can be read as being about an ineffectual, drunken leader, a disaster just waiting to happen. Here is a king manipulated by his advisors into making disastrous decisions. Weakness always allows either dangerous, proactive demagogues to emerge or self-interested vipers to step into the vacuum. This is a lesson the USA…
Gett
I have just seen a film called Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem, an Israeli-French production. It is a most offensive film depicting a cartoon of Judaism. An unhappy wife, mother of four children, is desperate to escape a loveless marriage in which her Moroccan-Israeli husband adamantly refuses either to understand her unhappiness or to grant her a Get. He…
Chaos
According to the Bible, before the world was created there was chaos, Tohu VaVohu. However, it was out of chaos that something positive emerged. I am a fan of chaos. The alternative to chaos is order. But too often order is worse. Human life constantly shuttles between these two, on a personal and on a national level. Jewish life, in…
Brawl in Ponevezh
“A brawl erupted at the Ponevezh Yeshiva, where a prominent rabbi, Shmuel Markovitz, was physically assaulted by a student of a rival faction, sparking the violent confrontation between Rav Markovitz’s students, who refer to themselves as ‘the Mehablim’, a Hebrew word meaning terrorists or saboteurs, then stormed the yeshiva dormitories of their long-time rivals, ‘the Sonim’, or ‘the haters’. The…