Mendel Kalmenson, at The Blogs

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Oct 15, 2024, 8:01 PM

Again and Again and Again

BH Many years ago, the Dalai Lama reached out Eli Wiesel with the following question: “Mr. Wiesel, your people were sent into exile over 2000 years ago, yet amazingly, you survived and are still here committed to your tradition. My people just left our homeland....

Jul 12, 2021, 12:51 PM

Live like you were dying

B’h Give it all you got In this week’s Torah portion we encounter a powerful insight into human nature by way of an interesting law related to warfare. The verse says: “And [the Israelites] warred against Midian, as G-d had commanded Moses.”1 While the Torah...

Jan 15, 2021, 6:10 PM

The greatest challenge of our time according to Natan Sharansky

During an interview with the legendary refusenik Natan Sharansky last year, I asked him what in his view was the greatest challenge of our times. “Arrogance,” he responded. “The degree of certainty and attachment people have to their own views, paths, and opinions, to the...

Dec 17, 2020, 7:26 PM

How the message of Chanukah can increase your mental health and wellbeing

As a young boy growing up in Czechoslovakia, Hugo Gryn, who would grow up to become a prominent Jewish leader in England, was sent to Auschwitz with his family. For a while he and his father shared a barrack. In spite of the unspeakable horror,...

Jul 4, 2019, 12:50 PM

The Rebbe’s legacy after 25 years: Accessible Judaism

Menachem Mendel Schneerson - the Lubavitcher Rebbe. (Credit: Wikipedia/Mordecai baron via Jewish News)

After Steve Jobs died in 2011 a one-line obituary in a mainstream media outlet read: “Steve Jobs put a powerful computer inside a phone and that phone into 120 million pockets.” It struck me then that throughout history the people who left the greatest mark...

Feb 27, 2018, 11:12 AM

A unique event, celebrating a unique community

Numerous truisms wax poetic and philosophical about the ways in which a society can be measured, but this past Monday evening, at an inspiring evening organised by the Jewish News celebrating hero’s within the British Jewish community, it struck me that the best way to...

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About Me

Rabbi Mendel Kalmenson is the rabbi of Beit Baruch and executive director of Chabad of Belgravia, London, where he lives with his wife, Chana, and children. Mendel was an editor at the Judaism Website—Chabad.org, and is also the author of the popular books Seeds of Wisdom, A Time to Heal, and Positivity Bias, and an upcoming book titled "People of the Word: 5o words that shaped Jewish thought"