Rabbi Richard Hirsh is the assistant rabbi at Congregation M’kor Shalom in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.
Richard Hirsh
By Richard Hirsh
-
Community What Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band Can Teach Us About Teshuvah
It was the summer of 1967. Wearing some flowers in your hair. Free music in the park. Acid trips. Haight-Ashbury. The Monterey Pop Festival. “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” And it was also 50 years ago today, “Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play.” A half-century ago, the Beatles released the soundtrack to the…
-
Opinion Purim Is No Laughing Matter In The Post-Truth Era
For centuries Purim, which celebrates the narrow escape of the Jews of ancient Persia from an edict of extermination, has been played as comedy and carnival in which a serious story of near-genocide is deflated through costume and parody. But this year, Purim does not seem quite so humorous. There is too much at stake….
-
Culture We Are Not All Alike
Avrum Burg draws a number of distinctions in his analysis of parashat Bo. The core of his argument is that “Every struggle for freedom is a struggle to seize the mastery of time” and coordinate with this, and that “command of time is the essence of freedom.” A subsidiary argument contrasts in a similarly binary…
-
Opinion I’d Give It a 7… It Had a Good Beat, and You Can Daven to It
What we frequently refer to as the High Holy Days are more accurately described by their Hebrew appellation: Yamim Noraim, the “Days of Awe.” Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are supposed to be significant because of the weighty confrontation with ultimate issues that they embody, especially issues of morality and mortality. For many rabbis, however,…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
Fast Forward Why some Satmar Hasidic leaders endorsed Zohran Mamdani as mayor, stunning many Jewish voters
- 2
Opinion I’m an Israeli who lives in New York. Here’s why I’m voting for Mamdani
- 3
Sports It’s so cool that Sandy Koufax was there for that
- 4
News How Mamdani built bridges to Jewish New Yorkers, from Williamsburg to Park Slope
In Case You Missed It
-
Opinion The three profound Jewish lessons of Mamdani’s astonishing victory
-
News Mamdani’s victory divides Jewish leaders one more way: Whether to say congratulations
-
Fast Forward In a first, a ballot initiative to divest from Israel has won at the ballot box in Boston suburb
-
Fast Forward In NJ governor’s race, Mikie Sherrill fends off GOP candidate whose aide spurned ‘money from Jews’
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
