Rabbi Jeffrey K. Salkin
Rabbi Jeffrey K. Salkin is the spiritual leader of Temple Israel in West Palm Beach, Florida, and the author of numerous books on Jewish spirituality and ethics, published by Jewish Lights Publishing and Jewish Publication Society.
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On February 13, 2017, only weeks after Trump was inaugurated President, I wrote a blog about Trump’s mental condition and whether it ought to disqualify him as president.
I’m certainly not a prophet nor the son of a prophet in the sense of predicting the future. Actually, the biblical prophet displayed only the capacity to see reality clearly as it was, to project forward the consequences of that reality, and to predict doom based upon the moral failures of the present. In that sense, the psychologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, political thinkers, historians, and friends of Trump that I cited called out who Donald Trump was and what America could expect going forward with
Hanukkah begins on Thursday night…and not a minute too soon.
At noon on Tuesday, every cellphone in Southern California buzzed with an emergency alert from the state office of emergency services: “New public health stay at home order in your area. COVID-19 is spreading rapidly. Stay home except for essential activity. Wear a mask. Keep your distance.”
There is darkness…and we need light. There is worry…and we need calm. There is isolation…and we need community. There is an enemy…and we need a miracle to overcome it.
Two thousand and fifty-five years ago, a small band of zealous Jews also faced darkness, worry, isolation, and a seemingly intractable enemy. The Syrian-Greek overlords had desecrated the holy Temple in Jerusalem, capturing the menorah, rendering the sanctuary dark. Mattathias and his five sons worried that some Jews were losing their religion by assimilating into the attractive Hellenistic culture. The Maccabees, isolated in Modi’in, embarked on a seem