“These are the instructions concerning animals, birds, all living creatures that move in water, and all creatures that swarm on earth, for distinguishing between the unclean and the clean, between the living things that may be eaten and the living things that may not be consumed.” (Leviticus 11:46-47)
By legacy, by history – by divine decree, if you like – we are a people of discernment.
Our tradition gives us such binary categories as pure and...
Read more about What's Kosher in a Complex World?
The wondrous ending...
The story of Passover is one of the world’s oldest and most influential accounts of liberation, the transit of a nation “from ignominy to celebration,” in the words of the Mishnah, “from servitude to freedom, from mourning to holiday, and from gloom to great light,” in the words of the Seder’s Haggadah....
The voices of the high school students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, who visited Harvard’s Kennedy School this past week to speak in the Institute of Politics about their leadership toward reform in firearm legislation, truly are some of the most impressive voices I have heard at...
“Thus all the work that King Solomon did building the House of the Eternal One was completed...” (I Kings 7:51)
“And now,” says the Divine to Moses, in our reading from the Torah this week, “tell the Children of Israel to bring you clear oil of beaten olives, for light, to kindle an eternal lamp.