My wife and I have just returned from an amazing visit to Israel. One feature of the population stuck out, delighting us both. While Israel has many unique facets, in one way we felt that we had stepped into a time warp, beaming us back to healthier days in the United States. Regardless of actual...
Like most of you, I do not know how to assess the actual health threat of the Coronavirus while recognizing that much of the panic, economic and social damage is media and politically driven. Panic hit my town today, with markets overflowing as customers stocked up in preparation either for being quarantined or for shortages....
When the English novelist, Charles Dickens, visited a prison outside of Philadelphia in 1842, he witnessed prisoners being held in solitary confinement. He wrote that most people are incapable of recognizing the full extent of the torture and agony of being incarcerated alone. He insisted that the mental torture of solitary confinement was far worse...
It is time for re-entry to reality. I have been off-line for over a week and only now do I realize how “connected” I usually am. For many years, during our summer boating trips, we were out of touch in a way that today’s youth can’t imagine. When we sailed from California to Hawaii one...
A ‘Your Mother’s Guidance’ post by Rebecca Masinter The first verse of the entire book of Leviticus seems to have a superfluous phrase. It begins, “And He called to Moses, and God (God) spoke to him.” One classic transmitter of ancient Jewish wisdom from the 11th century focuses on that the extra phrase. Why did...
Jews around the world recently finished an annual cycle of reading the Five Books of Moses (the Torah) and immediately began reading again from the beginning of Genesis. Since so many of us met the “stories” in Genesis as children, we sometimes neglect to view the book with adult eyes. Ancient Jewish wisdom analyzes each...
I accept your teachings of God’s desire for his children to interact with one another and am intellectually exploring those ideas. As a gifted software engineer interacting with other humans is not one of my strengths and I am attempting to get better at it. Over the past couple of years, however, I felt the...
Question: I have been listening to your podcasts & have found them to be very informative & fascinating. I just listened to your episode of 2/20/16 about Jewish attitudes towards money, business, etc. I was saddened, though, as I heard you discuss the 10 Commandments in terms of God’s 5 Commandments about “connections”. I am...
