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Oct 16, 2026, 8:26 PM

Strategic Response vs. Reactive Entanglement

It was a very beautiful week. It was a very challenging week. And in some of the most meaningful ways, the beauty emerged from the very challenges. We celebrated the culmination of the High Holiday season with Simchas Torah, that...

Oct 13, 2026, 12:04 AM

The Knife and the Book

Mt. Sinai - Photograph by David Raphael

In our synagogue, perhaps like synagogues around the world the big issue we struggle with, perhaps every year, is why the Torah Reading for the second day of Rosh Hashana the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac. It puts, quite...

Oct 10, 2026, 1:26 AM

She will dance again

"Bite," 2017, Eva Avidar, clay, iron. Photo: Dor Pazuelo

On Sunday I made the call and told Eva that her sculpture was broken. She understood before I’d finished my first sentence. I braced for the worst

Oct 7, 2026, 12:06 PM

The Newest Yizkor Has a Timestamp

Three years after October 7, Israelis are writing the next chapter of Jewish memory while it happens, with stickers, red anemones, 2,100 filmed testimonies and a dawn minyan that stops at 6:29 This year, for the first time since that...

Yaakov Chaliotis

Oct 7, 2026, 3:13 AM

After October 7: Jewish Resilience, Moral Clarity and Zionism

October 7th, 2023. Since that day, especially being a religious Jew, every year I find myself thinking back to where I was and what I was doing while our brothers and sisters were being slaughtered by the terrorists of Hamas. That...

Irina Zavina-Tare

Oct 4, 2026, 8:35 AM

The October 8 Jew I Became

There are days that divide a life into before and after. The birth of a child. A marriage. A death. A diagnosis. We all have dates that become markers, moments after which we are somehow no longer quite the same...

Orly Lavi Travish

Oct 4, 2026, 5:53 AM

For years, living in America, I have carried a quiet ache. It comes from the persistent distance I have felt between the local Jewish community and the Israelis living right beside it. We walk the same streets, work side by...

Oct 4, 2026, 3:56 AM

My first Yizkor was on Yom Kippur.

There was a heaviness built into it. I was fasting. It was Yom HaDin. I had spent days thinking about the fact that for the first time in my life, when everyone else walked out for Yizkor, I would...

Dovid Flinkenstein

Oct 3, 2026, 9:28 AM

Was It Staged in Plane Sight?

Why are there so many conspiracy theories about this attempted hijacking? Why are people insisting that it was staged, or that perhaps there was merely some kind of fight between the pilots, an emergency landing, and then an elaborate...

Oct 3, 2026, 9:16 AM

We Have a Friend in the Skies

By now, you most likely know the amazing details of the tremendous miracles we experienced aboard the Flydubai flight to Israel. You have heard about the extraordinary courage of the Israeli civilians, about the extra pilots who “happened to...

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