David Wolpe
By David Wolpe
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Opinion How to grapple with the Lag B’Omer tragedy? Remember fate is random.
Every tragedy seems to cry out for an explanation. Initial explanations are practical and outline the worldly reasons why a terrible event occurred. For believers there is an additional burden — the question of how God could allow such suffering. The deaths on Lag B’Omer at the tomb of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai on Mount…
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Opinion Debate is a Jewish sacrament
This article is part of a new series called “On Persuasion.” We asked thought leaders to consider what persuasion means to them. What works in terms of persuading people? Is it moot in 2020? What is the Jewish value of persuasion? Should we be opening our minds to other points of view, or closing them…
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Opinion Even during a plague, choice is destiny
BG IMG LINK Previous Article Next Article In the book of Job, after Job has suffered great losses, his friends come to comfort him. Finding Job sitting on the ground covered in boils, they throw dust up in the air and onto their heads (Job 2:12). A modern Israeli scholar, Meir Weiss, suggests this may…
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Opinion Shavuot, When We Became Who We Are
(JTA) — Rabbinic tradition teaches that when God spoke at Sinai, the world was silenced — birds did not sing, breezes did not rustle leaves in the trees. Out of that profound silence came the word, and were the world silent again, for even an instant, we could hear the everlasting echo of God’s voice….
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Opinion Why Jews Should Not Accept Jesus — Whatever George W. Bush Thinks
The dispiriting news that President George W. Bush plans to speak at a fundraiser to a group of ‘Messianic Jews’ led me to reframe and slightly revise an article I wrote several years ago. It not only explains in a short compass why Jews do not accept Jesus as a Messiah or son of God,…
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Opinion In Defense of Transgression
Clergy sin, but they rarely advocate sin. There is an apparently apocryphal story about the famously reticent President Calvin Coolidge: Upon returning from church and being asked by his wife what the preacher spoke about, Coolidge is supposed to have answered “sin.” His wife persisted: “What did he say?” “He was against it,” Coolidge replied….
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Fast Forward USC cancels commencement speech from Muslim valedictorian after she shared link to anti-Israel website
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Fast Forward 2 House members lead the charge to oust the speaker. Both have been accused of trafficking in antisemitism.
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Opinion The head of the largest Christian Zionist organization is no friend to Israel — he wants an apocalypse there
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Opinion USC: Don’t blame Jews for canceling your valedictorian
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News ‘A culture of harassment’: Hillel’s CEO sees trouble for Jews in new spate of campus clashes
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Culture That Passover song about the goat captivated a famous artist who wasn’t Jewish
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Theater Hidden in this picture, the murder of 1.1 million Jews
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Fast Forward Columbia protests: Israeli professor barred from campus and Congress members demand action to protect Jewish students