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Kingdom of Priests

“And God said, Let there be light: and there was light” (Genesis 1:3). I was just haggling with my wise editor at the Forward over my use in an op-ed piece — about the Biblical commandment of counting the Omer — of the term Dark Age to describe our own times of secular ascendancy. This…

As I prepare resignedly to download and mail off my usual application for an IRS tax extension, I won’t hide from you that in this period of recession money is a worry with our family. Thank God I have a job. And thank you, as well, to the Discovery Institute that values my thought and…

Rabbi Gil Student, who writes the always fascinating and learned Hirhurim blog, drops by to comment on my assertion that Christians invented Zionism. He points to a book that attributes early proto-Zionist thoughts and deeds to the students of the Vilna Gaon, who himself lived between 1720 and 1797. Even if you were willing to grant…

Happy Easter to my Christian friends! American Jews have lots to be grateful for to you. For one, there’s a historical argument to be made that American Christians invented modern Zionism. That thesis relates to Passover. Yesterday in synagogues around the world, as part of the intermediate Sabbath of the festival, Jews read the passage…

Sorry if the question sounds tactless, and no I don’t in fact want to know the answer. I ask, instead, to point out the well intentioned but nevertheless inappropriate gesture of the President’s hosting the first ever Seder at the White House. The official photo shows him at the head of the table, where the…

As the Torah commands, Jews power down for the first and last two days of Passover. So Thursday and Friday I will have to miss blogging, as well as on Saturday, which is Shabbat, the Sabbath. I’ll miss you but will be back on Sunday. This post is being published automatically.

The Jewish web has been awash with excitement about the Blessing of the Sun, or Birkat Hachama, that happens only once in 28 years, on the Eve of Passover, and occurred this morning. Being the contrarian I am, I couldn’t quite get into it till moments before it was too late. Surprisingly here in the Seattle…

National Review Online thoughtfully offers a nice little roundup of a recommended Passover reading. Marshall Breger recommends: Aaron Wildavsky’s Moses as a Political Leader assists one in understanding the Bible generally and the Passover story specifically in political terms. The political saga of the Jewish people is a story worth remembering. The Haggadah, of course,…

In the new issue of The American Scholar, Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd tries to explain how a universe unguided by divine purpose can still have meaning. Most of the essay, “Purpose-Driven Life,” is pure blather, largely unreadable. But his simple point seems to be that purpose bubbles up from below through the otherwise “mindless process” of Darwinian evolution:…

In the New York Times this morning, the day before Passover, the usually thoughtful and humane columnist David Brooks invites us to re-enslave ourselves to Pharaoh, king of Egypt. Not just Jews, either, but everybody. That’s the unstated message of his column in praise of emotion as the guiding force behind moral reason. Or what we…
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