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...
My revered teacher Rav David Weiss Halivni will be eulogized with many superlatives – all of them deserved. Since his earthly departure on June 29, 2022, the last day of Sivan and the first day of Rosh Hodesh Tammuz, tributes have been profuse. Rav Halivni has been...
As the YIVO institute describes him: “Nachman Blumenthal was especially interested in the power of language.” That is why he made it his lifelong mission to collect, categorize, and define the terms Nazis used in the pursuit of the Final Solution. By training,...
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...