ONE OF THE most divisive issues today in Israel politics is the drafting of yeshivah students into the Israeli army. It is not a new issue at all, being hotly debated for decades now. Those pushing for the draft have their reasons, and those against it have theirs, without any real common ground between them.
I must have been a teenager when I first saw the movie: 2001: A Space Odyssey. No, dinosaurs were already long gone, but it was decades ago. It was quite spectacular for its time, and its message was quite prescient, but there was also so much I just didn’t get.
THE CONCEPT OF blessing is known far and wide and for who knows how long now? In the Torah, it goes back to the first man, and even before. Both religious and secular people use the term, and both mean that the blessed is successful. It’s just that the religious person says that the source of the blessing is God, and the secular person just means that they have been lucky.
LAST WEEK I received a forwarded email that was titled, “Joseph Goebbels Could Have Written This in the 1930s.”
THE NAME ALONE makes me uncomfortable. It’s not just what Korach did, because there have been many rebellions against the Torah leadership throughout the ages. It is also about who he was and what he became.
