Understanding Circumstances

Our eyes, our point of view, our leaders in believing. A Holocaust survivor's choice of faith, story of Rabbi Akiva and the foxes, the different meanings of the words for seeing in Hebrew, using Shabbat as the time to gain perspective.

Is savining a child from being raised non-Jewish considered Pidyon shevuyim? Is there a mitzvah of pidyon shevuyim when someone was captured because he was doing something irresponsible or illegal?

To the alienated and assimilated Jewish world, Israel is somewhat of an embarrassment. It is too Jewish, too traditional, too conservative, too provincial and parochial for their broad, universal, liberal, hedonistic, pacifist worldview.

The “Arab spring” has turned out to be pretty much of a bust with no real political or economic progress left in its wake. Hundreds of thousands of Arabs have been killed since the “Arab Spring” and almost all of them were killed by their fellow Arabs.

Shooting the messenger and disregarding the message is the norm here but it is a dangerous and very self-defeating norm.

D-Day was as much a moral victory over evil as it was a military expedition that succeeded against most formidable odds. It renewed the belief that good can and will overcome evil and that tyranny and hatred eventually always must collapse from the weight of its own iniquities.