Off With His Head
Capital punishment is one of the modern era’s great controversies. Does a judicial system have the right to sentence a person to death? Like most such controversial topics, similar…
Explain Ourselves
While Judaism may appear to be a religion with many holidays and an interesting history, those who explore the religion more deeply soon realize that it is a lifestyle based on a complex…
Judah The Prince
Pirkei Avot, Ethics of the Fathers, begins: “Moses received the Torah from Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua; Joshua to the elders; the elders to the prophets; and the prophets handed it…
Facing The Challenge
Laws about food, business, relationships, worship, time and even the way one should speak...Is Judaism all about laws, about doing this and not doing that? Human nature resists laws and…
Rabbi Meir
The Mishna is a collection of citations of the oral law by an array of brilliant scholars. There are, however, many Mishnaic statements that are anonymous. According to Talmud Gittin…
And You Shall Teach
Do you know the phone numbers of all of your siblings and your three closest friends? Since the advent of the PDA (personal digital assistant), and perhaps even since the beginning of…
The Orchard
The Talmud (Chagiga 14b) tells the story of four rabbis who entered the Pardes (literally, the orchard), which is understood to be a metaphor for entering heaven through intense…
Lag Ba’omer
The period of mourning (for the 24,000 students of Rabbi Akiva who died of plague) associated with Sefirat Ha’omer ends on the 33rd day of the Omer, a day known as Lag Ba’omer. In…
The Tragedy of Jealousy
The Talmud (Yevamot 62b) relates that “Rabbi Akiva had 12,000 pairs of students...and all of them died in one period of time because they did not act with respect toward each other...they…
Kedoshim 5760 – 2000
"The Revolutionary Idea of Holiness" by Rabbi Ephraim Z. Buchwald In this coming week's parasha, Parashat K'doshim, we encounter that magical and revolutionary word which the Torah has…