Jeremiah foretells a time when a Messianic redeemer will reign over Israel, doing what is just and right in the land (Jeremiah 23:5). This King will be a descendant of the Davidic line. The actual wording of the text refers to the Messiah as “a true offshoot” (zemah...
Aside from Rosh Hashanah (literally, the head or start of the year), the Jewish New Year is also called Yom Ha-din (Judgment Day), Yom Teruah (the day of the sounding of the shofar), and Yom Ha-zikaron (Remembrance Day). The latter name, according to some, refers to...
Whenever I teach about the obligations parents have to children I inevitably cite the alternative opinion in the Talmud (Kiddushin 29a) that states that in addition to the ritual obligations of circumcision and redemption of the firstborn (when applicable), and the...
Lost among all the cancelations due to COVID-19 was “Liberation 75,” a commemoration – perhaps the final one – for Holocaust survivors. “Liberation 75” was intended to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the liberation of the death camps with a gathering of...
On June 10, 2020 the Jewish world has lost one of its greatest and least recognized thinkers. Hakham José Faur died in Israel at age 85. In a way, his life mirrored the trials and vicissitudes of diaspora Jewry. He was born in Argentina to a family from Damascus, he...
Stan Boutin, a biological scientist at the University of Alberta has been researching red squirrels in the Yukon for more than thirty-five years. In the course of his work on the Kluane Red Squirrel Project he has documented a phenomenon important to the evolution of...
In one of the most moving passages of the High Holiday liturgy worshippers implore God “not to cast us off into old age.” But old age, like the future, ain’t what it used to be. Consider the case of Don Pellemann. In 2015 at the age of one hundred, Pellemann set five...
The prayer added to the liturgy during Hanukkah thanks God for the victory over the Syrian Greeks by the Hasmoneans, a victory of “the weak over the strong, the few over the many.” While the Jews did indeed win the war, the conflict between Judaism and Hellenism...
Assessing the sheer carnage of World War I and the new and deadlier ways of killing, H. G. Wells concluded that he had lived to see the “war to end all wars.” He was wrong. Wells died in 1946, having lived through the second - and even bloodier - world war. Wells...
A mammalian biology professor once assigned his international students a paper on elephants. The French students chose as his topic “The Cuisine of the Elephant.” The Italian student wrote on “The Romantic Life of the Elephant.” The German student wrote on “The...