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,…
Most Popular
- 1
News Scoop: Heritage Foundation plans to ‘identify and target’ Wikipedia editors
- 2
Fast Forward Their Pacific Palisades synagogue is standing, but all three rabbis lost their homes
- 3
News ‘Do you have the Torahs?’ Synagogue races LA wildfire to rescue its past and future
- 4
Culture In Peter Yarrow’s legacy, an uneasy blend of Jewish values and personal transgressions
In Case You Missed It
-
News Lipstadt has ‘hope’ Trump team will build on her antisemitism work
-
Fast Forward A lost film about Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side returns to the big screen in NYC
-
Opinion ‘The rabbis did disaster pretty well’: Amid wildfires, LA Jews cope with regret — and rancor
-
Fast Forward Javier Milei, Argentina’s pro-Israel president, is first non-Jew to win ‘Jewish Nobel’
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism