What follows is not news – I’m nearly two months behind things. But then again, everything on the internet is simultaneous, isn’t it? So I think it remains worth discussing. Maybe it’s news to you. On September 30, perhaps the leading Palestinian peace advocate, Sari Nusseibeh, published an essay on why Israel cannot be a “Jewish […]

Ansche Chesed folks know that last week I undertook the food stamp challenge – the self-imposed commitment to live for a week as if all I could spend on food and drink was $4.50 per day, the average benefit. Since I went from Shabbat to Shabbat, I only went six days, not seven, and spent […]

Yesterday was the 12th of Cheshvan, the 16th anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin’s murder, at the hands of a right-wing extremist, Yigal Amir. That day and the succeeding days are vivid in my memory. We were in Jerusalem, and had no television in our apartment, only a radio, which we kept in the bedroom we shared with our […]

Two-and-a-half days into my “Food Stamp Challenge,” and I have to say … it’s not easy. Generally, the experience is attuning my attention to just how plentiful and varied food typically is in my life. There is just so much food out there on the streets of New York, all of it attractive and fairly […]

Tomorrow after nightfall, we will recite Havdala and conclude Shabbat, and – as always – I will wish my family a shavua tov, a good week. But for me, this coming week will not be so good – or at least not so easy. Because when Shabbat ends, I will begin a week of the […]

This week’s Sunday NY Times “Ethicist” column was a fascinating reflection about honesty and deception. The questioner was a man who years ago had an adulterous affair with a neighbor, and he writes that he is the biological father of her child. Neither the child’s presumptive father – that is, the woman’s husband – nor […]

  Camp is over, after a great season. Today is Rosh Hodesh Elul, and I’m back in New York. Summer is departing, and autumn looms. (And I will resume blogging. Thanks for patience during a hiatus.) I love autumn, my favorite season. It brings me football, and leaves carried on cool breezes, increasingly frantic preparations […]

It’s 100 degrees here in Camp Ramah in the Berkshires. It’s sweltering, humid, buggy and dusty. Pretty miserable. But then, miserable is just what high summer should be on the Jewish calendar. This week we marked the 17th of Tammuz, the minor fast day marking the date when a number of mythic calamities befell Israel, […]

The Torah’s authority is bound up with the moral stature of those who teach it. Consider a well-known passage from the Talmud (Yoma 86a) on the verse “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart.” The Sages understand this to mean you should not only love God with your own heart, but […]

I can think of no social transformation in my lifetime as rapid and sweeping as the acceptance now accorded gay people. I understand if some gay people view their public embrace as less than quick or irrevocable. But from the lynching of Matthew Shepherd to Brokeback Mountain to gay marriage … it spins your head […]