Rabbi Avi Shafran
By Rabbi Avi Shafran
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Opinion Balkanization of Western Wall Prayer ls Threat to Jewish Unity
I really must avoid spicy foods — even my wife’s scrumptious jalapeno pepper-laced cornbread — before retiring at night. The recipe’s great, but for someone approaching 60, it’s also a recipe for indigestion-fueled nightmares. The scene of my latest bad dream: the Kotel, or Western Wall, in Jerusalem. The time: some future point, may it…
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Opinion Our Stance on Homosexuality
The chief rabbi of Amsterdam, Aryeh Ralbag, was suspended in January for signing a document stating that one can be “healed” from homosexuality. Though he was eventually reinstated after apologizing to the community for having signed using his official title, the episode does provide an opportunity to consider exactly what the traditional Orthodox view on…
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Opinion Misusing Judaism in the Service of Roe
‘Oh, come on!” the e-mail read. “What’s a few dead children on the altar of my liberal slippery-slope paranoia?” Gruesome as the imagery was, I had to smile. The message was intended as a humorous ‘Touché” from an academic who had originally contacted me in anger. He was not only honest enough to concede his…
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Culture The Enduring Power of ‘Education’
My 13-year-old son, Menachem, is my valued chavruta, or study partner; he has a keen and creative mind, and I hope he will one day become a true talmid chochom, or religious scholar. We study Talmud together every evening and Sabbath; Menachem’s mornings at yeshiva are also filled with the study of religious texts. But…
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News Naftali Neuberger, Led Famed Baltimore Seminary
The voice on the phone several years back could have belonged only to one of two people, and I really had no reason to imagine that Henry Kissinger would be calling me. To my greater honor, the caller was Rabbi Naftali (Herman) Neuberger, president of Baltimore’s Ner Israel Rabbinical College (where I studied in the…
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Opinion Abortion Rights And Wrong
Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators flocked to Washington, D.C. on April 25 for a rally in support of legal abortion. Thousands of the participants attended as members of an assortment of Jewish organizations. And many of those Jewish participants nurtured a deep conviction that their stance expressed a deeply Jewish value. They were wrong. To…
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Opinion The Importance of ‘Marrying In’
Is it wrong for Jews to believe that Jews should marry other Jews? The question was raised during the national political campaign in 2000, in the context of Senator Joseph Lieberman’s vice presidential candidacy. As an observant Jew, the senator was assumed to embrace the religious tradition’s view on intermarriage, a view unarguably and unambiguously…
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Opinion When Poverty is Worth Less
‘Chutzpah” was the title of an editorial in the June 6 issue of the Forward; the alleged audacity referred to was the Republican leadership’s exclusion of low-wage families from the recently enacted increase in the federal tax credit for families with dependent children. The editorial noted that “50 million households — those that most need…
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