An oft repeated observation is that those who can, do; those who can’t, teach. At times, even Jews have denigrated teachers. In the Eastern European shtetl, the melamed – teacher of small children – was thought of as a failed rabbi. As a teacher of many years, I find...
Growing up as I did in Washington Heights, Manhattan, there were two names that were pre-eminent in the minds of the Jewish community. The first was Rabbi Joseph Breuer and the second was Rabbi Shimon Schwab. Both were committed to preserving their Ashkenazic roots...
A story is told – presumably apocryphal – about the time Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, was scolded by one of the more officious members of the Kenesset for attending with an open collared shirt, no jacket, and no tie. Ben Gurion claimed that he had...
The decline in synagogue attendance in the non-Orthodox world is not a new phenomenon, though the problem has been exacerbated by COVID restrictions. The immigrant generations that populated Conservative and Reform synagogues through the twentieth century still...
Not only was he an ordained rabbi from an illustrious family, Dr. Abraham Twersky was a trained psychiatrist and proficient author. Early in his career he had served as a psychiatrist in a large state mental hospital. He would conduct tours of the facility for...
In January 2022 the New York Times investigated the reasons for the dramatic upswing in the murder rate in the United States in 2020 and 2021. Experts pointed to three reasons. First, the pandemic disrupted every aspect of society over its duration. Social services...
As a rabbinical student, I learned that should anyone generate a novel understanding of the text (hiddush, in Hebrew), two questions need be asked: first, is this novel understanding of the text correct? and second, why has no one thought of this before? These two...
As any Bar Mitzvah boy will attest, the transition from minor to adult is manifested by the wearing of tallit and tefillin. (In the 1950’s and 1960’s many traditional synagogues organized Tallit and Tefillin Clubs as a way of keeping young Jewish teens engaged in...
One of the most telling comments of the pre-eminent medieval commentator, Rabbi Shlomo ben Yitzhak of Troyes appears at the very beginning of the book of Genesis. Citing a question raised by an earlier midrashic authority, RaShI (the acronym by which he is known) asks...
Pharaoh remained unimpressed. Turning a staff into a snake was a feat easily repeated by Egyptian magicians (Exodus 7:11). And even after Moses’ snake swallowed up the magically crated ones, Pharaoh was unmoved. Turning water into blood fared no better. Pharaoh’s...