There’s an old joke: Two fish are swimming around in a fishbowl when one asks, “How’s the water?” “What the hell is water?” the other fish responds. In “The Shape Of Water,” Guillermo del Toro’s newest tour de force film, the lonely, mute Elisa (Sally Hawkins) is miserably acclimated to her everyday, mundane routine —…
The Book of Ruth, or Notes on Serendipity And she went, and came and gleaned in the field after the reapers; and her hap was to light on a part of the field belonging unto Boaz, who was of the kindred of Elimelech. —The Book of Ruth, 2:3 As luck would have it, the first…
The festival of Shavuot has begun, which means it’s time to read the biblical Book of Ruth. It tells the story a non-Jewish woman who marries a Jewish man (no mention of rabbinic conversion, by the way), becomes a widow and ends up on welfare — or, as it was known in those days, gleaning…
If the current Israeli government were in power back in biblical times, there is a good chance that there would actually be no State of Israel today in need of governing. This is the message of a simulated correspondence between the Israel Religious Action Center and Israel’s Ministry of Interior, written by Anat Hoffman, IRAC’s…
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