The Ansche Chesed blog is a place where you can find enriching material to read about God, Torah and the Jewish People.
These weeks since October 7 have been unrelentingly awful. Grief. Panic. Heartbreak for the hostages. Revulsion at Hamas’ cruelty. Horror at the suffering of Gazans. Despair for the future. Not to mention Jew-hatred in America, especially on campus. And the great difficulty of talking about all this among friends and family, whose differing views can… Read more »
I became rabbi at Ansche Chesed in August, 2001, just a month before 9/11. I was with you through the horror and anxiety of those weeks and months, into the beginning of the forever wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This was during the second intifada, which had begun a year before and would last until… Read more »
The Jewish people are good at remembering important dates. We left Egypt on the 15th of Nissan. Moses smashed the Ten Commandments on the 17th of Tammuz. The Babylonians destroyed the Temple on the 9th of Av. Fifty years ago today – Yom Kippur, 1973 – was one of the worst days in our long… Read more »
When my oldest son commenced his mature political engagement with Israel, about 10 years ago, in times that seemed complicated then but comparatively innocent now, he used to ask me: What is your red line? When does Israel do something so outrageous that you stop supporting it? I would invariably reply: nothing. Nothing could shake… Read more »
In the last week, the nation state of the Jewish people came to an extraordinary political crossroads that should terrify and repel everyone who, like me, continues to believe in Zionism and Judaism. As widely reported, in order to maximize the number of right-wing seats in the next Knesset (to be elected April 9), Prime… Read more »
