We have now entered the Jewish month of Elul. We say "goodbye" to the "lazy hazy crazy days of summer", as the song goes. Pleasure is over; back to business. The religious academies reopen. We blow the shofar every morning and say an extra Psalm as we start preparing for the h

The word Kabbalah, simply means "tradition". Its root is the Hebrew word for "receive". It implies a received tradition. There have been traditions handed down, orally and in writing, throughout the three thousand and more years of Jewish history. From its very inception Judai

The idea of the ten Sephirot (literally the "categories" or "symbols") is the most familiar and widespread of all Kabbalistic motifs. It first appears in the books of Sefer Yetzirah and Sefer Bahir, and probably dates from the first millennium

God can be a very negative word for many living in the secular West. It conjures up authority, even fear, empty religious ritual and forms of worship that leave us cold. We are told that God is omniscient and omnipotent, knowing everything, able to do a

A few years ago, I unintentionally upset someone. It was at a bar mitzva where I had been invited to "address" the young man. As part of my sermon, I had said that you don't have to take the traditional Jewish date of the creation of the world as being literally 5763 (or whatever it was

A few years ago, I unintentionally upset someone. It was at a bar mitzva where I had been invited to "address" the young man. As part of my sermon, I had said that you don't have to take the traditional Jewish date of the creation of the world as being literally 5763 (or whatever it was

Since my youth the color and the flavor of Anglo and, indeed, world Jewry has changed. I was brought up in a world in which the vast majority of Jews desperately longed to be accepted by the non-Jews, and as a result relegated their Jewishness to the margins of their lives. In Brit

The fact is that right from the start, when Adam was tol

Look at how the personality of Yosef develops. He starts off as an arrogant young man, full of himself, comfortable telling tales to his father about his brothers and quite uninhibited in recounting dreams that clearly describe how he will rule them. Even if we accept the traditional idea that he

The connection between social depravity and sexual depravity is often overlooked. Lot split from his mentor Avraham and chose to live in the immediately attractive, but corrupt, city of Sodom. He had learned about hospitality from Avraham. He said very similar words of welcome to the angels that

In reference to my post "Am I A Believer?", several readers have told me that the most troubling issue is less belief, but more what actually happens, or is allowed to happen, on earth. To make matters worse it is religion that is often the cause of much of our suffering. Of course we m

It is a fundamental of most religions that there is a God who has created and runs our universe. But, in the Bible, which really is a book about God and His intervention in human affairs, there is no actual command that is worded, "You must believe in God." And in a way this makes wonde

Jewish mothers tend to get a bad press. It’s not just Philip Roth and Portnoy’s Complaint. It’s a much wider issue. In Western literature, the Jewish Mother has become an object of scorn, even worse than the dreaded Mother-in-Law. And did you know that the Yiddish for a Father i

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