A variety of important/inspiring/challenging things have made it through across my screen for Yom Ha’Atzmaut. I’d like to share some with you. A truly inspiring figure and one of the great rabbis in Orthodox America, R. Yosef Blau – the “Spiritual Guide” or Mashgiach Ruchani at Yeshiva University’s rabbinical seminary – spoke a year ago of […]

Another Yom HaShoah has come and gone, now 67 years since the end of World War II. Not that in all those years we’ve gotten it just right when it comes to marking these most overwhelming events in all the 4,000 years of the Jewish people. I think about this a lot, as a synagogue […]

I know prayer is difficult for many modern people. We often feel like we’re at the far end of a disconnected pay phone. Yet I still feel the enormous power of prayer to re-orient the self, to help us connect to our deepest, wisest and noblest wishes for the world. At least it helps me. […]

Today was a holiday in my neighborhood. Not a Jewish holiday, of course, but one I admire nonetheless: Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, a 40-day period of fasting and repentance before Holy Week and Easter. What I admire about Ash Wednesday is its AWESOME ritual: the smearing of a cross of ashes upon the […]

This past Shabbat at Ansche Chesed, the feminist theologian Judith Plaskow was in our community, to celebrate a bat mitzvah with us. As we read Parashat Yitro – with relates the revelation of the 10 Commandments at Sinai – one sort of feels like it is Plaskow’s signature parasha, given the title of her most well-known […]

I’ve been away from Honest to God for a few weeks, mostly working on a research project for another audience, but I’ll get back into the swing now, beginning with this. Last month I posted the earlier comment called “Not So Honest Kars-4-Kids” about the charity which would seem to be intentionally obscuring its Orthodox […]

I’ve just completed the easiest fast day of the year – the 10th of Tevet, a minor, sun-up to sun-down fast. (It’s so easy because it always falls around the winter solstice, so the fast usually concludes around 5pm at the latest.) Off the top of my head I couldn’t tell you what the 10th […]

The first time I heard the ubiquitous 1877-Kars-4-Kids radio ads, I knew where this was headed. Who solicits donations for “kids” “… please help a kid today” … without saying who was to benefit? Which kids? In Brazilian slums? Mentally disabled kids in the Appalachians? Crack babies in New Orleans? If this fine organization was […]

We sports fans have had our world rocked in recent weeks with the horrifying sexual abuse reports coming from the Penn State football program, and (on a smaller scale) the Syracuse basketball program. The Penn State case has been uniquely horrid since it reveals the moral weakness of someone with a public persona of great […]

I’ve been thinking about the widening Long Island SAT cheating scandal, since another 13 people were arrested last week. Now five young men have been charged with taking college board exams on behalf of others, and 15 with hiring them to do so. It is time to do what Jews do in such scandals: examine the […]