What is portrayed as the debate between religion and science feels increasingly like watching the very bitter dissolution of a doomed marriage. The relationship started out all roses and kisses, proceeded to doubts and regrets, then fights and silences, a mutually agreed separation, and finally to curses and maledictions: “I wish you were dead!”Read More
With its roots ostensibly in seasonal farming routines, the Jewish ritual of counting the Omer between Passover and Shavuot doesn’t at first seem ripe with contemporary significance. But I often remember Rabbi David Lapin’s comment that he is surprised at how previous generations found as much meaning in Jewish observances as they did, when the real importance of some of those practices became apparent only much later.Read More
Following Barack Obama’s victory, political conservatives are suffering a crisis that could be called psychological but is better described as spiritual. The mood is one of depression, despair, panic.Read More
A friend of mine in the media covered the Republican National Convention and brought me back a souvenir: a navy blue yarmulke with “McCain ’08” printed on it in English and Hebrew. I guess there wasn’t time for the campaign to make them up with Sarah Palin’s name, too, which is a shame. With all the disquiet she has evoked in the Jewish community, that would be a collector’s item.Read More
Farewell, Forward readers. Owing to the tolerant and genuinely pluralistic editorship of J.J. Goldberg and Oren Rawls, I’ve had the privilege these past five years of speaking to this newspaper’s mostly liberal readership. I have done my best to articulate a religiously and politically conservative worldview rarely heard in the Jewish community.Read More