I heard an interesting insight from a rabbi friend today on the 17th-century hymn “Shalom Aleichem,” sung on Friday night before the Sabbath dinner. The song welcomes “ministering angels, angels of the Most High” and asks them, “Bless me with peace, angels of peace,” before, in the very next stanza, bidding them farewell, “Go in…

In introducing Dungeons & Dragons to my oldest son, Ezra (age 8), I was amused, bemused and ever so slighted worried by his instant attraction to wanting his character to be a druid. In D&D, druids are kind of lame characters to play so I managed to talk him out of it. An angle on the…

We’ve discussed before the question of what constitutes the “image of God” inscribed in the human body. The issue came up in the context of devotees of theistic evolution like Francis Collins or Kenneth Miller who say there’s no problem for their Biblical faith in thinking God relied on a chance-driven evolutionary process to produce…

I’m preoccupied by the old wives’ tale that Judaism has no missionary or conversionary genes in its spiritual DNA. This is one of those untruths that gets repeated so often, it’s taken for granted even by many thoughtful Jews. Maimonides, Sforno, and Rav Hirsch refute it soundly, as I’ve indicated before. Here’s more proof, that…

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