Judaism

By Rabbi Leonard Rosenthal SAN DIEGO — Parashat Va-etchannan contains the first paragraph of the Shema: “Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” Since the Torah is never redundant, the […]

By Rabbi Tzvi Hersh Weinreb NEW YORK — “Religion is good for you.” “A religious person is a mentally healthy person.” Statements such as these could not have been made when I was a graduate student in psychology back in the 1960s. Quite the contrary. The prevalent belief in the mental health profession then was

  By Dr. Navras Jaat Aafreedi GREATER NOIDA, India– It is the stuff of which films are made and novels are written. His absorbing story is such that it connects three continents, Asia, Europe and North America, five countries India, Israel, Canada, United Kingdom and Pakistan, and two communities seen as natural adversaries today, the

By Rabbi Tzvi Hersh Weinreb NEW YORK– I have kept my time-worn copy of Roget’s Thesaurus in my personal library since I was in the seventh grade. It was given to me by my teacher, a Mr. Zeller, who introduced me to the beauty of language and who first stimulated my fascination with words. He

By Rabbi Ben Kamin ENCINITAS, California — I had recently the privilege of bringing two elderly men together with common narratives: both were born in villages along the Carpathian Mountains, both suffered through four Nazi concentration camps, and both were liberated from the notorious Ebensee work-to-death camp by US forces on May 6, 1945. They

By Rabbi Baruch Lederman SAN DIEGO — When praying on behalf of someone who is seriously ill and they unfortunately pass on, there is a tendency to grow despondent and to be overcome by a feeling that one’s prayers are for naught. The Steipler Gaon once enumerated some areas in which such tefillos achieve significant

By Rabbi Tzvi Hersh Weinreb NEW YORK — Every so often, I come across a sentence of another person’s writing which expresses one of my own thoughts in a language far superior to my own. Over the years, I have contemplated and written about the concepts of “honesty” and “integrity” and the difference between the

By David Strom SAN DIEGO–For someone who does not know much about the birth of Christianity, The Liars’ Gospel provided easy access into those biblical times. The author, Naomi Alderman, a British award winning writer, gives what I believe to be a Jewish view of the times. She reimagines the life of Jesus, from the

  By Rabbi Tzvi Hersh Weinreb NEW YORK–Jewish people teach Jewish values to their children, and to all who wish to be informed about their faith. If one is asked “Should I or should I not?” we generally respond with clear and certain advice: “Yes, you should”, if the value is a positive one, or