Dear Friends, It seems that summer is the season of weddings. We have four new SAMS couples celebrating their upcoming nuptials over the next few months. Four different stories of laughter, learning, loss, and, of course, love. Often the most difficult part of my job is trying to answer those pressing questions facing the newly engaged: how […]
I’ve always been a big fan of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. From a young age, I can remember the characteristic swell of strings in the background of memories. I always enjoyed the story the music told, taking the listener through the course of the year– beautifully realising the patterns of nature into the harmonics of music. The […]
Much has been made of the sibling challenge to Moses in this week’s parashah: “Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of the Kushite woman he had married: ‘He married a Kushite woman!’” (Num. 12:1) Various commentators have proposed to explain this strange verse, saying that either 1) Miriam was jealous of Tsipporah’s beauty, or […]
24 May 2018 One of my missions in life is to dispel misconceptions about Judaism- it more or less comes with the territory. Whether it’s assuring people that the ‘sheet with a hole in it’ thing is just an urban legend or trying to demonstrate that not all Jews are white, I enjoy the effort to try and […]
Dear Friends, In the unlikely event that you have had the blissful pleasure of being totally ignorant of the internet for the last 72 hours, I’m want to point your attention to an argument which has raged across cyberspace, tearing apart families, causing marital strife, and leading to thousands-long comment chains of people yelling at […]
A little over three years ago now I spent a weekend at a Washington D.C. conference centre filled with 20,000 people– all there to lobby their senators and congress people to support defence and diplomatic ties between America and Israel. It was March 2015 and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA, better known as […]
During this period of the Omer (between Pesach and Shavu’ot) many people observe certain customs of mourning: not shaving, not celebrating weddings, not buying new clothes, and not listening to instrumental music. Strangely enough, this custom arose as a way of marking a mysterious plague of the ancient world. ‘What plague?’ you may ask. For […]
A catholic priest, a buddhist, and a Jewish-Quaker walk in to a room. While this sounds like the beginning of an (admittedly bad) joke, it’s actually just the setting for an interfaith event which took place last night sponsored by the Cathedral’s programme: ‘Interfaith St. Albans.’ The subject of the evening, in line with Sustainable […]
Today is Yom haAtzma’ut, the day on which, seventy years ago, Israel became a sovereign state for the first time in 1,878 years. Rabbis have debated exactly how we should relate to this event in our own time– is it a modern miracle? Is it simply the result of luck and/or politics, or can we […]
One refrain I hear very often is that the Holocaust marks the biggest challenge to (or sometimes even hyperbolically-stated as the ‘end of’) Jewish theology. The idea that the horror of the Sho’ah is an irrevocable condemnation of God seems to me both misguided and far over-simplistic. Whenever I teach about what academics call ‘theodicy’ […]