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 […]

Welcome to this new blog about Judaism, the religion of the Jewish people. I’m writing from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the capital of the Diaspora, at the corner of West End Avenue and 100th Street at Congregation Ansche Chesed. I serve as rabbi to this exciting community, a Conservative synagogue which is intellectually vigorous, […]