I am experiencing serious FOMO. I am totally bummed that I am going to be out of the range on Monday to watch the solar eclipse. So, let's talk about Judaism and eclipses. Are there eclipses in the Bible? Most likely. It is possible that the plague of darkness during the Exodus from Egypt was a total eclipse of the sun. Likewise, when the sun stood still in the book of Joshua, that also might have been an eclipse. There are also references to solar eclipses in medieval Jewish texts,...

What are the three little words that rabbis almost never, ever, say to their congregations. Hold on, because I am about to say them. God loves you. That is the topic of Rabbi Shai Held's new book, "Judaism Is About Love,"` which is also the topic of today's "Martini Judaism" podcast. Wait a second, you are saying. Isn't this supposed to be Martini Judaism -- not Martini Evangelical Christianity? Am I reading the wrong column, or has Jeff Salkin decided to convert? Neither. Let’s face it: “God...

A very intelligent young person once asked me: “When did the Bible stop?” “What do you mean?” I responded. “I mean,” she said, “when did they decide that the Bible was finished? Why can’t we simply add on to it? Why can’t it be like a loose-leaf notebook, where you put things in and take them out whenever you need to?” I admit I had found that question to be, well, irreverent. Now I am not so sure. Now I actually think it was a great question and I have been asking it myself. Not about taking...

It is November 10, 1938. It’s in a small city in Germany. It is the night after Kristalnacht, the night of broken glass that ushered in the mass roundups and the killings that would become the Holocaust, what we call the Shoah in Hebrew. There are a group of men shoved together in a cell. They are all of different ages. One of them turns to a much younger man, a rabbinical student who was no more than twenty years old. “You! You are a rabbinical student. You are a student of Judaism. So tell...

The other day, I was talking to someone about a friend of mine who had converted to Judaism, a.k.a., joined the Jewish people. My conversation partner stopped me in my tracks. "I don't believe in that," he said. "You can't convert to Judaism. You can't just join the Jewish people. You either are Jewish, or you are not. What — you take a class, and you take a test and they dunk you (in the mikveh, the ritual bath) and poof — you're Jewish?!?" "No!" he continued. "You have to have a yiddishe...

Did you ever think, in your wildest imagination, that the events of October 7 would lead to an all out culture war that would involve every sector of American intellectual and academic life? Me neither. And yet, here we are -- with the result that many American Jews are now questioning the role of the university in their lives, and in the life of the Jewish community. To help us discern the depths of the university and the Jews, check out the podcast -- a conversation with Mark Oppenheimer....

“Don’t know much about history…” Those were the immortal words of Sam Cooke. It happens to be true. Many of us don’t know much about history. Just think of the way that we use the word. Someone gets fired from a job, and what do we say? “She’s history.” But, I love history, especially American Jewish history. No one has nourished that love of history more than Professor Jonathan Sarna of Brandeis University, past president of the Association for Jewish Studies and Chief Historian of the...

No one ever asks, "Why should India exist?" Or Albania. Or the United States. Or any country in the world. Except for one country: Israel. So, let me make this simple — and overly simplistic. Why does Israel exist? Here are my two R's of Israel. To rescue Jews who are persecuted. To save Jews from Jew-hatred. That was the wake-up call that Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl experienced during the trial of Alfred Dreyfus for treason in France in the early 1890s. He saw the mobs in the streets...

Do you know what it’s like to fall in love? I don’t mean falling in love with a romantic partner. I am talking about the moment of falling in love with a performer — because you know that person gets it and gets you and understands you. That is what happened to me back in 1991, when a friend of mine played me an album called “From Strength to Strength” by Peter Himmelman. That title is a biblical quote. It’s what Jews say to each other at significant moments in life: “May you go from strength...

I first encountered Nora Gold when I read her amazing novel, Fields of Exile, which is about the anti-Israel ideologies that are now sweeping across the academic world – in her case, with a unique focus on what is happening in Canada. It is about antisemitism on the college campus. That book was enough to make me a total fan. Today, we are talking to her about her new collection -- 18: Jewish Stories Translated From 18 Languages. This is the first anthology of this kind in 25 years. And, no...

What do we do now? Many Jews, all over the world, are asking themselves that question during these difficult weeks. Israelis are asking: What do we do now – to rebuild our land, our towns, our kibbutzim, our broken lives? What does it mean to maintain hope in the Jewish future? A new book -- "Jewish Priorities: Sixty-Five Proposals for the Future of Our People" -- offers its readers numerous answers to those complex questions. This is an amazing, unnerving, and challenging book. It brings...

A blood libel. That was the first thing that went through my mind when I heard about the bombing of the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza, which claimed the lives of between 200 and 300 people. Palestinians, much of the Arab world, and various organizations immediately blamed Israel. There is now ample evidence, accepted by the United States, that the bombing was the result of a failed rocket that had been launched by Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Here is the audio and transcript of the Hamas...

I can't. I just can't. At Kibbutz Kfar Aza, they have found the bodies of some 40 babies, some of whom had been beheaded. This past week has been the most difficult week in the history of the Jewish people since the end of the Shoah/Holocaust in 1945. There is a word for what happened, and it is not an “attack.” It is a pogrom, and it makes the most infamous pogroms in Jewish history – those at Kishinev, 1903 -- pale in comparison. They did not go after military targets. Hardly. They have...

"Embarrassed." "Ashamed." "Confused." "Ambivalent." "Frightened." Last week, I sat with a group of Jews in a synagogue. It was an adult education session, and I had asked them to complete the following sentence: “When I think of Israel, I am…” Those were the reactions – what goes through their minds as they think about Israel, and what goes through their souls as they think about Israel. I was shocked, but I was not entirely surprised.

The word is "postmortem," and it fits. For that is what the media has been conducting in the wake of the catastrophe that befell the Titan in the North Atlantic with the tragic loss of five lives. And yet, almost immediately, there was an outcry. In the words of The New York Times: On one vessel, five people died on a very expensive excursion that was supposed to return them to the lives they knew. On the other, perhaps 500 people died just days earlier on a squalid and perilous voyage,...

This conversation with author Bruce Feiler could not have happened at a more opportune time. I am in the process of retiring from the full time congregational rabbinate. I am in the process of finishing up a pulpit career that lasted more than forty years. Over the last few weeks I have found myself repeating the words of my rabbi. Peggy Lee, who sang plaintively: “Is that all there is?”  Is that all there is to being a rabbi? You build relationships; you teach Torah; you embody; you...

“So, Rabbi, in your more than forty years in the rabbinate, what are those things that surprised you – those things that you never expected, or that you once expected that didn’t actually come to pass?” There would be a long list, but here is the one that moves me in particular. Forty years ago, we never would have expected that so many Jews would turn to God as the location of their Jewish energies – that trend that we call Jewish spirituality. In particular, we never would have expected...

If we held a moment of silence for every American who died of COVID it would take nearly two years at a rate of 24 hours a day to cover every name. More than 6.6 million people worldwide and counting have died of COVID -- including more than a million Americans. These are all people who loved and were loved. This is an extraordinary and grim statistic, as on May 11, the CDC declared that the Federal COVID -19 Public Health Emergency has ended.

"That's it!" my friend told me over coffee. "I am so done with Israel! The corruption, the situation with the Palestinians, the racists in the government...How can you still support them? How can you even want to go there this summer?"

I started my rabbinical career 42 years ago, when I served as an assistant rabbi at a large, urban synagogue in Miami, Florida. Those were interesting and challenging times. I arrived in the wake of the Mariel boat lift. I experienced the plight of the Haitian refugees.  Those were the days of "Miami Vice," and I was living that television show. In 1983, I left Miami for points north, and I rarely looked back -- even though my late father eventually moved to south Florida. Time and...

It was the fifteen worst minutes in American Jewish history. It happened on October 27, 2018. It was a Shabbat morning. A gunman, Robert Bowers, entered the Tree of Life -Or L’Simcha Congregation in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – in the heart of the historically Jewish Squirrel Hill neighborhood. Bowers opened fire on the worshipers, and by the time his attack was over, eleven worshipers were killed, and six were wounded. Over the years, I have spent much time in Pittsburgh, teaching and...

Bernard Malamud. Saul Bellow. Philip Roth. Joseph Heller. Herman Wouk. J.D. Salinger. Norman Mailer. E.L. Doctorow. Chaim Potok. Leon Uris. That is a partial list of American Jewish writers of the recent past -- all of them lions of literature, and all of them now dead. There is one woman who belongs on that list, and she is the only one left of that generation. I refer to Cynthia Ozick, who last week celebrated her 95th birthday. Cynthia Ozick's literary output has been prodigious. Not only...

So, this really happened. Some years ago, my young cousin was on a United Synagogue Youth trip to Israel. While she was there, the group went north to tour the grottoes at Rosh HaNikra. Alas, while taking photographs, she dropped her camera into the water. She called her mother, heartbroken, and they both concluded the camera was irretrievably lost. A month after her return to the States, my young cousin got a package. It contained her camera. What had happened? Apparently, there were Israel...

It is time to play movie trivia. According to the American Film Institute, who is the greatest hero to ever appear in a movie? Indiana Jones? Rocky Balboa? Um, Gandhi? The answer: Atticus Finch, in "To Kill a Mockingbird" — played by Gregory Peck in the 1962 classic film adaptation of Harper Lee’s novel.