Op-Eds

I share observations that, although sometimes personal and in some discrete instances unique to my Orthodox Jewish religious faith and practices, I think also are universal and will help many readers navigate your own future experiences.

Torah interests in Eretz Yisroel are in serious trouble. In order to appreciate the issues and have any sense of true insight, we must take a step back and look at the Halacha, the history, the personalities involved and the agenda behind this women’s “semicha” campaign.

She was the love of my life, my “partner in crime,” and the reason and encouragement that motivated me to return to writing, to teaching law, and to serve again as a congregational rabbi after a prior career of 10 years in the pulpit.

I have had to scale back my writing a bit these past four months because of the hardest, most challenging experience of my life. You are my family, so I share: The love of my life, my wife Ellen, was fading.

In America for many years, we have been witnessing the Left’s double standards. When they are not in power, they speak of “equality” and “fairness.” They endlessly invoke the specter of 1950s “McCarthyism” as their mantra, their never-ending claim, even now, that they face “blacklisting” and discrimination in employment. And then, as soon as they have even the slightest influence and upper hand, they turn around and ferociously impose blacklists on others with whom they disagree.

The old story goes that two Jews were brought before a firing squad to be executed by the czar’s army. As they were being blindfolded, one of them shouts, “Down with the czar!” The other Jew, horrified to hear that, cries out to his friend, “Shah shtill, don’t make trouble!”

The very first time I saw the Derek Chauvin–George Floyd video I was disgusted. I yelled at my screen, “Get off the guy’s neck, you #$%!” So I was ready to get disgusted again when I first accessed the video of the fellow in Georgia who recently was killed by a cop there. And then I saw something that seemed so crazy that I replayed the video eight times because I kept not believing what I thought I was seeing.

It has never been the position of Orthodox Judaism that “Reform Jews are not Jewish.” Rather, that lie about what Orthodox Jews believe always has been a red herring and lie foisted by certain Reform rabbis to incite their ignorant and Judaically uneducated minions (but not minyans) to fight Orthodox Jews and to fight against Israel’s Chief Rabbinate.

During 1968 and 1969, the country was in a state of upheaval. Ostensibly as a protest of the Vietnam War, the “peace” movement took hold in universities across the country, upending the establishment. Here we are, 51 years later. What was considered revolutionary then is at best evolutionary now. Actually, the radical ideas then are the norm now. But worse.