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Kingdom of Priests

Today, a couple of days before Passover, a friend told me something that pained me. When he was a kid, his father, who was a lawyer, would inform him of how much in billable hours his time was worth, and remind his son that spending time with him was eating up precisely so much in…

A reader, Joyce, comments poignantly on my post about Newsweek‘s rabbis list, which is topped by liberal activist Rabbi David Saperstein. I had noted that the organization Saperstein heads up, the Religious Action Center, takes a firm stance against tobacco. Joyce wrote, “I guess I am ignorant and in the wrong religion. I thought preservation…

Is Judaism a race or a mission? Last week when I began writing this blog, my Beliefnet editor advised me about some recent trends in Jewish-related web searches. After all, we’re trying to keep things relevant here.  It turns out that there’s a great volume of web queries going on around the theme of identifying unlikely…

Thanks and congratulations to the editors of Mishpacha, a popular Orthodox Jewish magazine, for marking this year of Darwin anniversaries with a frank look at Darwinism’s cultural consequences. The author is also the author of this blog. I note the event not only because I think the piece is hard-hitting and I know it’s accurate,…

Newsweek published its list of the 50 most influential rabbis, and the usually entertainingly acerbic Failed Messiah comments blandly, “Star power trumps community influence.” There’s much more that we can say than that.  This list, which will be the talk of the Jewish community for the next week, along with that comment from the normally ferocious…

Have you seen the new Nicolas Cage movie Knowing? It’s actually pretty effective as science fiction entertainment, but what fascinates me about it is the weird way it raises questions about destiny or predestination that have been bugging me all week, and that are relevant to Passover.  I put this to you as a question…

Philo-Semitic Christians often cite God’s words to Abraham in Genesis 12:13 — “I will bless those who bless you” — as a big part of the reason for their passionate defense and activism on behalf of the state of Israel. Religiously committed Jews support Israel for reasons that don’t require much explication. But what if…

To my surprise tonight, I returned home from work about 8 pm to discover my two oldest children speaking Yiddish. They are Ezra and Naomi, ages 7 and 6, hereafter to be designated by their accustomed nicknames Ezzie and Noma. They weren’t actually conversing fluently in Yiddish but at their Jewish school, run by Chabad,…

There was a line of ants running up and down the face of the aboveground crypts of the huge necropolis, a city of the dead with story upon story of stacked crypts rising over the 405 freeway south of Los Angeles. My father and I were there at the well-known Jewish memorial park dominated by…
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