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Gentlemen, today is the seventh of Adar, the anniversary of the death of Moses our teacher, of blessed memory. We have gathered in…
With the passing of childhood and the waning of the impatient eagerness of adolescence, I was rapidly realizing that this was neither the best of all possible worlds, nor one that the optimism of late…
Says Moses, son to my Master, my father, R. Israel—may the memory of the righteous be for a blessing for the world to come—seeing that the illustrious author [Joseph Karo] of the Bet Yosef [Th…
Behold, I am aged and gray-headed—I know not the day of my death [see Genesis 27:2]! And when am I going to provide for my own house (Genesis 30:30), which I built, and for my children…
Our master, the holy rabbi, told a tale of the Ba‘al Shem Tov (may his memory be for a blessing to the life of the world to come!). There was once a matter involving great danger to the human life of…
Chapter I. IntroductoryI. The Problem of Coherence“There is (thus) a zone of insecurity in human affairs,” remarks William James in his essay on The Importance of Individuals, “in which all the…
If we Jews had our patron saints, the priest-prophet Ezekiel would be the patron saint of those of us who are vitally concerned in the outcome of the present crisis in…
Joseph Karo’s Shulḥan ‘arukh (Set Table)—printed together with the additions of Moses Isserles’s Mapah (Tablecloth) and first published in 1565—was a codification of Jewish law that was easy to use as…
Regarding those who fight one another inside the synagogue over the seats which each one has designated for himself, as when one is late in arriving and finds that another person is sitting in his…
When I last occupied this pulpit I spoke on the text, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” I tried to indicate some of the stages by which this maxim became the Golden Rule of conduct, until it…