Richard Diamond, at The Blogs

May 23, 2026, 1:08 AM

What Good Are 613 Commandments If We Fail the One?

There is a comforting story we tell ourselves. It holds that suffering ennobles, that the persecuted become the most reliable guardians against persecution, that a people who endured the full inventory of human cruelty would, of all peoples, carry...

May 22, 2026, 6:05 PM

A Holocaust Orphan, a Priest, and the Wall We Built Around the Law

Ronit Kertsner's documentary Torn, screening this week, through May 28, in the Times of Israel's DocuNation The Oral Law was meant to stay oral — flexible, merciful, alive. We wrote it into stone, and now even our most generous statute...

May 13, 2026, 9:16 PM

What the Kabbalists Knew Before the Physicists Said It

The Big Bang names not a first moment within time but the ontological inception of this cosmological regime — the constitutive actualization of spacetime, its laws, and its initial conditions, in atemporal dependence on the structure of possibility itself. That...

May 7, 2026, 11:03 PM

Explaining Why American Jews Are Not Emigrating to Israel in Large Numbers

Remembering the Lessons of Babylon After October 7, after the campus chants, after the harassment and the synagogue security details, many Israelis ask a question that increasingly carries the weight of an accusation: why aren't American Jews coming home? The numbers...

Apr 28, 2026, 6:04 PM

How Religions That Profess Love and Peace Accept and Promote Hatred

click to enlarge infographic.
Image by Google Notebook

There is a fact about religious history that most believers prefer not to look at directly: the faiths that proclaim love most loudly have, more often than not, produced the most organized and sustained hatreds. Christianity, whose founding text...

Apr 26, 2026, 5:42 PM

Israel’s Most Dangerous Enemy May Be Internal

clck to see entire infographic
Image by Google Notebook

The Frame That Houses Arguments: Israel's Most Dangerous Enemy May Be Internal Jewish civilization has a trick, and Israel inherited it. The trick is older than the state, older than Zionism, older than the modern era — old enough to...

Apr 22, 2026, 8:21 PM

Negotiations with Iran Will Never Resolve the Problem!

click to see full inforgraphic
image by Google Notebook

The only path to a real solution is the one already underway: the destruction of the regime that makes the problem possible. Let's be honest about what is actually happening in Islamabad. American and Iranian diplomats are sitting across a table...

Apr 15, 2026, 9:30 PM

Why Negotiation Cannot End a Holy War – God Doesn’t Sign the Accord

click to see entire infographic
Image by Google Notebook

Calling for a negotiated settlement to end the Middle East conflict at this moment in history carries roughly the same practical weight as a candlelight vigil and a collective prayer for peace — sincere in impulse, ceremonially satisfying, and...

Apr 14, 2026, 7:18 PM

Support for Jewish Survival – If Convenient

click to see full infographic
image by Google Notebook

There is a sentence you will never hear spoken aloud in any foreign ministry, any chancellery, or any presidential press briefing. It is nonetheless the operative principle governing the relationship between the Jewish people and virtually every other nation...

Mar 31, 2026, 8:13 PM

Israel Doesn’t Have One Purpose. It Has Five. That’s the Problem.

The fracture in Israeli society is not a failure of leadership or civility. It's a war between four incompatible visions of what this country is actually for — held together by one thing, and increasingly nothing else. Every country has...

About Me

Richard Diamond is a retired technology executive, lifelong student of Jewish philosophy, and frequent writer on the intersection of theology, ethics, and public life. He brings decades of leadership experience, historical insight, and personal commitment to Israel’s future to his thoughtful explorations of contemporary Jewish challenges.