Jewish Religion

By Rabbi Tzvi Hersh Weinreb   NEW YORK — If you have raised a child, you have had this experience. Your little boy or girl came home from school with a sample of his or her artwork. To you it just looked like a hodge-podge of scribbles, random color smears. But your child exclaimed, “Look, Mommy,

By Rabbi Michael Leo Samuel CHULA VISTA, California — The accidental burning of the Quran in Afghanistan raises some important questions: How does one dispose of old religious literature? The 18th century Muslim scholar Allamah Haskafi, author jurisprudence text Durr-Mukhtar, wrote of the disposal of the no-longer wanted Qurans: “If one decides to get rid

By Rabbi Leonard Rosenthal   SAN DIEGO — Last weekend Judy and I visited our son, daughter-in-law, and grandsons in Cincinnati. We had a great time.  Before we returned home, I was faced with an interesting ethical dilemma. On Monday afternoon we ate lunch at Cincinnati’s beautiful Mayerson JCC. The JCC operates a kosher café.

By Rabbi Baruch Lederman SAN DIEGO–Jewish jokes tend to be insightful: A man was traveling through a town where an old friend of his lived. He decided to seek him out and pay him an impromtu visit. He asked someone, “Excuse me, I am looking for a friend of mine Mr. Schwartz. Do you know

By Rabbi Tzvi Hersh Weinreb NEW YORK– It is something I have noticed just about every election year, and I am always taken aback by it. This year was no different. Inevitably, the major candidates make their income tax reports public. Included in these reports are the contributions to charity that they have made during the

By Danny Bloom CHIAYI CITY, TAIWAN — If racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination, then faithism is the belief that belief in different gods or Gods justifies spiritualism discrimination in terms of who goes to heaven and who goes to hell, among other religious beliefs. In the

By Rabbi Dow Marmur JERUSALEM –Had the Nazis not come to power in his native Germany, W. Gunther Plaut would have become a judge. But being barred from pursuing a legal career because he was a Jew, he dedicated himself to serving God and his people. That brought him to the Hebrew Union College in

By Rabbi Baruch Lederman SAN DIEGO — Emunah (faith) and Bitachon (trust) are two bedrocks of Judaism. We have emunah and bitachon in Hashem, our G-d. The difference between these two related concepts can be illustrated by a joke, told to me by my colleauge Rabbi Dovid Max, Community Torah  Center of Bucks County, Richboro,