David Wolpe is the Max Webb Senior Rabbi at Sinai Temple. His most recent book is “David: The Divided Heart” (Yale University Press).
Belief is not a static illusion to be knocked down at the introduction of a new scientific hypothesis or discovery. Faith is an orientation of soul, a posture toward God\’s universe that finds expression in many religious traditions.
For we have in our midst an essayist with a slightly more down-home American tang (Max Beerbohm was essentially, quintessentially, British). Joseph Epstein combines that Yankee brio with a Yiddish wit and an elegant erudition that recalls Beerbohm. He is funny, he is wise and you ought to be reading him.
Cline\’s book is a dispassionate recounting of the central issues that preoccupy scholars and pseudoscholars of the biblical text.
By the age of 26, Winston Churchill had fought in several wars, become a hero by daringly escaping prison during the Boer War, been elected to Parliament and written several popular books (including \”My Early Life,\” which dramatically recounts his escape). Already he was well on his way to becoming what we now know him to be, the most extraordinary character of the 20th century.
Zachary Karabell offers a different perspective on the question of Islamic rule in his history, \”Peace Be Upon You: Fourteen Centuries of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Coexistence in the Middle East\” (Knopf, 2007).
Shysters chase ambulances; critics chase influences. How to characterize this Chandler-Babel stew? Let\’s try the Hollywood idiom. \”The Yiddish Policeman\’s Union\” is Woody Allen meets Cornel Woolrich. No, better, deeper: S.J. Perelman meets Y.L. Peretz meets Harry Turtledove. Martin Amis meets Stanley Elkin who is chatting with Sholom Aleichem about Jorge Luis Borges.
I do not want an \”us\” and a \”them.\” If you are not really ready to be part of one community, which means to have friends, to marry, to rejoice together, to grieve together, then all I can tell you is you should find another place. But I think that you are, I hope and pray and believe that you are.
\”Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity\”: Traditional Judaism feared and distrusted this child of the enlightenment. Although prominent Jewish thinkers, from Moses Mendelssohn to Solomon Maimon to modern Zionists, have claimed him as their own, every deliberation on Spinoza wonders — is he a Jewish thinker?
The Haggadah tells us \”you were strangers in the land of Egypt.\” Here is the interesting thing — because we were strangers, we are supposed to learn not how the Israelites should have acted, but — how the Egyptians should have acted. We are supposed to learn how not to oppress others. Don\’t treat others the way we were treated.
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