Pope Francis frequently strays. He ought to be commended for his straying. While admittedly, I’m no expert when it comes to popes, Jorge Mario Bergoglio a.k.a. Pope Francis, does not feel constrained in any way to stick to the text, both literally as well as figuratively. Refreshingly different than his predecessors, Pope Francis injects more than a modicum of “down […]
Former New York Mayor Bloomberg scored a triple mitzvah play the other day, when he boarded El Al to Tel Aviv. While I have no idea how many times his honor has visited Israel, chances are his decision to travel was pretty much spur of the moment. No sooner had the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) declared that US flights to […]
As part of a people who have witnessed more than their fair share of its people literally going up in smoke at the hands of others, we Jews ought to be horrified beyond words, when we read about someone dousing himself with gasoline and then setting himself ablaze. Personally speaking, I find it even more horrendous, if that individual is […]
A little over a week ago, as over a hundred Dallasites came together here at Tiferet, overwhelmed by profound grief and at a loss for words, because of the savage and brutal murder of three innocent Israeli teenagers, I exclaimed “G-d forbid”, not once, not twice, but three times, that we Jews should sink to the sub-human level of those […]
Weinreich’s Yiddish-English Dictionary translates mentschlechkeit as humaneness. Mentschlechkeit is the uncanny ability on the part of us Jews to respond to unspeakable grief and tragedy in a mentschlech way, even though we have more than sufficient reason not to. Mentschlechkeit filled the air this past Tuesday evening here at Tiferet, when well over a hundred individuals, Jew and non-Jew alike, […]
