Spin the radio dial in any direction and most of what you come up with is just plain junk. One clear exception is Larry Mantle\’s \”Airtalk,\” weekdays on public radio station KPCC.
At a recent Shabbat, a guest at our services asked the person staffing our welcome table, \”Is the rabbi here Jewish?\” What the person meant was, \”Is the rabbi a convert?\” Many have shared with me over the years, as our congregation has grown, that acquaintances of theirs have told them, on good authority, that Rabbi Finley \”is not really Jewish.\”
Memories of lost family are conjured when walking in footsteps of the past
Dear Mr. Prime Minister;
By now you have certainly received thousands of congratulatory messages celebrating the good news that you and your wife, Cherie, are expecting a baby next summer.
When you write a book-length study of a living author lots of things can happen; most of them are bad.
\”You\’ve missed a nuance here, a shading there,\” some will point out, in the iciest language possible, while others go straight to the jugular and angrily insist that you don\’t know beans about their work.
Joseph Heller, who passed away Dec. 13 at the age of 76, was a wonderful exception.
Chanukah begins this evening, and not a moment too soon.
When my daughter was young and the sun rose and set on her every lesson with alphabet and equation, I bemoaned any gap between Christmas and the Festival of Lights. The closer, the better, if you ask me. How better to illustrate the primal lesson of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the pleasure and challenge of a Jew living simultaneously in two civilizations.
Last week I was driving to a family celebration at Leisure World in Laguna Hills when I noticed something very odd about the weather: Fall was in the air.
A newspaper office is, in some ways, a hot-house world. There are those insistent deadlines every week; copy to edit; layouts to peruse; the telephone and e-mail increasingly the link to a world that\’s outside.\nBut then — thank goodness — there are those forays out of the office. They turn out nearly always to be a surprise; nearly always a learning experience.\n\nI had three such experiences this past week.\n\n
Anyone seeking explanations for a given period or event related to Moses need simply look to this well-organized volume.
