Is Hanukkah merely a holiday telling us a heroic story of battles won and political victories gained, like the American Fourth of July or the French Fourteenth of July? A […]

The story of Hanukkah is typical of all our confrontations in the Galut, the Diaspora. In aristocracy, each family has a coat of arms, an emblem. What was the emblem […]

I remember hearing or reading that R. Moshe Feinstein blamed the mass defections from Jewish observance in America during the first half of the twentieth century on a simple phrase: […]

Sarah’s biblical epitaph enumerates the years of her life in an unusual fashion, with the word “years” repeated three times: “one hundred years and twenty years and seven years” (Genesis […]

When the three travelers, angels in disguise, came to visit Abraham, the ailing patriarch chose to disrupt a conversation with God in order to greet them (Gen. 18:1-2). Thus Chazal […]

Finding the Holy “And Abram passed through the land unto the place of Shechem… and the Lord appeared to Abraham and said: To your seed will I give this land; […]

The Mishnah (Berakhos 15a) records a dispute over whether you can fulfill your obligation to recite the Shema if you are not careful in how you pronounce it (kara ve-lo […]