Page 30 - Jonathan Sacks News Today

Why Would We Yearn For A Place We Hated?

I confess to a thrill every time I read these words: Tell Aaron and his sons, “This is how you are to bless the Israelites.

(Video screengrab) Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly, has died at the age of 93. He died on May 2 in Brunswick, Maine, his daughter Jane Montgomery Abernethy announced in a Facebook post. She said her father died of natural causes. Abernethy was a correspondent for NBC News for more than four decades. Working in Washington, Los Angeles, London, and Moscow, he covered the fledgling US space program, Congress, and the Soviet Union’s collapse. In 1997, he turned his broadcast exp...

Reuven Rubin, (1893-1974), The First Fruits, 1923, triptych, oil on canvas, coll. Rubin Museum, Tel Aviv First Fruits was painted by artist Reuven Rubin in 1923. It is a triptych, a painting in three panels, traditionally a Christian expression of homage, that can be viewed from several angles. It is a landscape. The people in the picture represent those then found in Mandatory Palestine. The Arabs in the two side panels are sidelined, in favor of the drama of the central panel, which depicts t...

After interviewing seven applicants May 7 for the vacancy created by the retirement of Duval County Judge Ronald Higbee effective June 30, the 4th Circuit Judicial Nominating Committee sent the names of five candidates to Gov. Ron DeSantis for his consideration. The commission convened and interviewed the applicants at the Duval County Courthouse. The public was allowed to watch the interviews on Zoom. The nominees: • Margaret Gibbs Gulliford is an assistant state attorney in the 4th Judicial...

Rabbi Sacks, zt’’l, had prepared a full year of Covenant & Conversation for 5781, based on his book Lessons in Leadership. In the final parsha of the book of Leviticus, in the midst of one of the most searing curses ever to have been uttered to a nation by way of warning, the Sages found a fleck of pure gold. Moses is describing a nation in flight from its enemies: Just the sound of a windblown leaf will put them to running, and they will run scared as if running from a sword! They will fal...

By Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, zt”l | April 29, 2021 Rabbi Sacks, zt’’l, had prepared a full year of Covenant & Conversation for 5781, based on his book Lessons in Leadership. Embedded in this week’s parsha are two of the most fundamental commands of Judaism—commands that touch on the very nature of Jewish identity. “Do not desecrate My holy name. I must be sanctified among the Israelites. I am the Lord, who made you holy and who brought you out of Egypt to be your God...

The Prime Minister has publicly denounced "identity politics" for the second time in two weeks, calling out cancel culture and social media misuse along the way. In a speech closely echoing his comments to a Christian conference last week, Scott Morrison preached the importance of both community and individuality while warning against "forces that would undermine" those things. "I dont just mean, as Ive recently remarked, the social and moral corrosion caused by the misuse of social media, and ...

How Can You Help Solve the Tuition Crisis? By Steven Starr | April 22, 2021 The “tuition crisis.” It’s a well-worn phrase in every Modern Orthodox household with school-age children. It’s a regular topic in the pages of this newspaper, and in a 2017 survey of American Modern Orthodox Jews it was ranked as the most serious problem facing the Jewish community by a wide margin. We all know that the financial burden of sending our children to Jewish day school...

Rabbi Sacks, zt’’l, had prepared a full year of Covenant & Conversation for 5781, based on his book Lessons in Leadership. The Sages were eloquent on the subject of lashon hara, evil speech, the sin they took to be the cause of tzara’at. But there is a meta-halachic principle: “From the negative you can infer the positive.”[1] So, for example, from the seriousness of the prohibition against chillul Hashem, desecrating God’s name, one can infer the importance of the opposite, Kiddush...