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Virtual Talmud

I wasn’t surprised to read in The New York Times that Rick Warren, mega-church pastor and best-selling author of “The Purpose Driven Life,” is advising Jewish religious leaders on how to draw more Jews into synagogue life. It’s very Jewish to apply and adapt the best of wider society to Judaism. That is what the…

It’s a not-so-well kept secret that recently many Jews–many Americans, in fact–have come to find traditional, frontal services where congregants sit quietly in pews to be off-putting and, dare I say it, boring. For a certain generation raised with a different set of attitudes toward institutions and authority, this may have been the way to…

Do you think Rick Warren, the author of the “Purpose Driven Life” and super duper mega-church leader, knew the joke about two Jews and three opinions when he sat down to consult Synagogue 3000 on how to attract more Jews to synagogues , maybe? Nonetheless, as they say, ignorance is bliss and most important, it’s…

In our hearts, Jews are immigrants. The very name “Hebrews,” Ivri’im, comes from the word ‘to cross over’; Hebrews are boundary crossers. Our founding story portrays us as refugees arriving to our land, and Judaism itself is a religion forged in exile and the experience of powerlessness, where stock was placed in prayer, study, and…

Where should we stand on immigration reform? If not for the closed-door policies and quotas held by America and other countries barring Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe, the Holocaust would not have claimed its millions of victims. As Jews, we understand that part of our job is to protect the weak and persecuted, which sometimes…

Recently, The New York Times published an op-ed by Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles, who expressed his indignation at HR 4437, an immigration bill passed in the U.S. House of Representatives in December that includes provisions for a 700-mile wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and making it a felony to be in the U.S.…

To the chagrin of many of my friends, being ethical does not entail defenselessness. Power, like anything else, can be ethical; it must be ethical. From a Jewish perspective, it’s tempting to make powerlessness a pre-condition for ethics. Jewish liberals are fond of pointing to the biblical prophets’ ability to speak ethical truth to power.…

In recent months, public opinion has increasingly been turning against the war in Iraq–and for good reason, as body counts for U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians continue to soar, as the situation on the ground becomes increasingly chaotic, and as each successive justification proffered for the war proves false. Of course, we all know that…

We should never have gone into Iraq unprepared and under false pretenses. If we had waited for the inspectors to do their thing, if we had waited for the support staff to be in place to bring back electricity and water right away and to actually secure the country, the resistance would never have found…

There are very few things more important to building community than food. Food brings us together in companionship (literally: ‘bread-breaking’), helps us celebrate joyous occasions, and connects us to one another through shared moments. Some Jews see kashrut–the system of Jewish dietary laws–as a source of separation from non-Jews, and there may be an element…
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