“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” So begins Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s book “The Social Contract.” I’ve been thinking...

Happy Chanuka! What follows are some words of Torah that I offered on Saturday night in honor of the 25th anniversary of the passing of...

One well-known example of “chutzpah” is someone who murders his parents, then pleads for mercy from the court because he is an orphan....

Imagine a shiny Cadillac pulls up to your house and a guy in a fancy suit, smelling of cologne, knocks on your door. “Just sign this,” he...

Parshat Toldot 1 F WE COULD X-RAY OUR HEARTS — NOT THE fist-sized muscle, but the pulsating center from which our dreams and desires...

Parshat Shmot SOMETIMES, THINGS GET WORSE before they get better. Sometimes, things get worse even as they are getting better— as...

Parshat Naso Who fought the first religious war? The answer, according to Genesis, is Cain and Abel: "Cain brought an offering to the...

Parshat Vayetze Jacob, escaping his murderously angry brother, more or less stumbles unto "the gates of heaven," described laconically in...

Torah' for Israel's Jubilee May 1998 (first published Jerusalem Report) For 50 years, Israelis have allowed the state to shape their...

Losing God and Finding Him is Part of What it Means to be a Jew GOOD NEWS: WE ARE NOT THE FIRST generation to be fraught with alarm over...

this is about the Torah portion of the week So here will be all kinds of writings from the Torah portion of the week.

Paashat Shlach Lecha. Originally published in "The People and the Book", Jerusalem Report, June 15 1995. The unfinished story of the...

Israel's economic planners have fallen under the sway of the International Monetary Fund, and are hypnotized by the Credit Rating...

We are faced with a religious leadership that is largely indifferent to the economic gaps that have opened up in Israel, or the...

Yitz Greenberg, 73 years old, is arguably the most important rabbi that American Jewry has yet produced, and the most profoundly American...

In the past, those figures who most represented the Jewish people’s universalistic thrust, such as the Pauline Jesus and Marx, soundly...

Shlomo’s Torah transported listeners emotionally and imaginatively, connecting them to inner states of longing and healing — to a...

Chabad Messianists, the Rebbe, and the Future of Judaism On April 9 this year, some four thousand men and women crammed into Yad Eliyahu,...

ברדיפה אחרי כסף וכוח הולכים ומשתלטים כמה תאגידי ענק על משאבי הטבע והכלכלה של העולם כולו. התהליך, אשר גורם להרס חייהם ותרבותם של מאות...

Eritreans in Israel claim they are refugees from a murderous regime. In their thousands, they have braved Sudan and the Sinai desert in...