Watering our Weeds
The following post (originally written Feb 2009) was greatly expanded into “Watering our Weeds” (MS Word, PDF), an essay in Daas Torah: Child and Domestic Abuse vol. I (pp. 220-233), a book by R’...
Category: Mussar
An Esrog For Your Wife?
Lifted from Revach.net. An Esrog For Your Wife? Rav Shalom Eisen, z’tl was a dayan and moreh tzedek in Yerushalayim more than fifty years ago. He was also known as an expert in the...
Letter to RCA Membership – Glatt Yosher
The following letter was sent to RCA member rabbis: Dear Rabbonim Chashuvim, We know that, like us, you were sickened and embarrassed by the recent scenes of religious Jews being led off in handcuffs,...
Memories of His Child Ephraim
(My first attempt at this post was seriously flawed, both typographically and in flow. This is a significant reworking. If you have ideas for further improvement, they’re eagerly invited.) I Why is it that...
Finding the Means to Return to Your Ideal You
Many thanks to Jon Baker for recording my talk before selichos at the Yavneh Minyan last motza’ei Shabbos. The material: An audio recording is here. And here is the handout. The first two pages...
9/11 and How to Effect Permanent Change
(Significantly expanded in response to writing on the subject for Yashar, the magazine of The Mussar Institute. -micha) I The most powerful High Holidays experience of my life was eight years ago. A week...
How Should I Respond? — Part II: Email from Agudah
I received the following in my email box. I am heartened to see that we as a community are seeking constructive response. I am writing to friends and supporters of Agudath Israel to call...
How Should I Respond?
When they gossip in Vilna, they desecrate Shabbos in Paris. – Rav Yisrael Salanter Some take Rav Yisrael Salanter’s causality to be metaphysical. I don’t think that fits R’ Yisrael’s general approach to life....
Finding Spirituality
R’ Rich Wolpoe shared with us on Avodah this challenge: My friend’s thesis is that Judaism w/o Qabbalah or Hassidus is mechanical and lifeless. And so he challenged me as follows: To List aspects...
Natural Morality and Halakhah
What’s the relationship between a human’s intuitive sense of what’s moral and halachic mandate? There is a tendency in some circles to describe the Torah as though halakhah was the sum total of the...