Category
rabbi steven z. leder
What we can and can’t do for Israel
Jewish Journal
August 14, 2014
Our hearts ache and our minds are confused by the violence in Gaza and Israel and the apparent rise in European anti-Semitism.
Wilshire Boulevard Temple: How do you raise $120 million?
Elyse Samuels
August 22, 2013
Ask Rabbi Steven Z. Leder what the mission of Wilshire Boulevard Temple is, and he’ll tell you, “We make Jews.” The temple started making Jews two centuries ago, in 1862, when the country stood divided, engaged in Civil War, with Abraham Lincoln as the president of the United States.
Wilshire Boulevard Temple’s transformation
Rob Eshman
July 31, 2013
My old office, on the 15th floor at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Kingsley Drive, looked directly at Wilshire Boulevard Temple. It would have been an ideal location to set up a time-lapse camera to document the slow but historic changes that have taken place there over the past few years.
The Way of Madness
Rabbi Steven Z. Leder
July 21, 2005
The idea of one Jew killing another is shocking. Most of us think it never happens — but the truth is that it does. It happens this week in the Torah with Pinchas. After seeing a Jew apparently enticed by a Midianite prostitute, Pinchas runs them both through with his spear.
It happened when the Macabbees saw a Jew publicly bowing down to a statue of Zeus in the town of Modin. It happened during the American Civil War, World War I and when the State of Israel was founded. Most recently, as most of us painfully recall, it happened when a young, deranged Orthodox Jew named Yigal Amir assassinated then Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin. Ironically, it was this week\’s Torah portion and the character of Pinchas that some of the most extreme Jews used as a justification for the assassination
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